


Protector

by capgal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Magical!Shield, canon compliant AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 13:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11875569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capgal/pseuds/capgal
Summary: In which Steve finds Bucky, loses Bucky, finds Bucky, and loses Bucky again, and picks up and drops the shield a few times along the way.Or: the one where everything is the same, except the shield is a magical alien artifact like Mjolnir.





	1. Protector, Arisen

**Author's Note:**

> I owe a big thank you to so many people:  
> * glide-thru, my artist, for the THREE amazing pieces she did ([here](https://glide-thru.tumblr.com/post/164469606965/stucky-big-bang-2017-entry-2-art-for-capgal))  
> * brickhousebuck for cheerleading me through everything  
> * galahadwilder for a last-minute sanity check and beta  
> * and everyone who expressed interest in my original fic-idea post, for giving me the encouragement needed to turn this into a full fic
> 
> It's been a steep learning curve figuring out how to execute a canon-compliant fic coherently, but in the end, it happened! I hope you enjoy!

Steve hasn’t been back for more than a few hours when Phillips calls him in.

He’s still high off the adrenaline of it, still trying to wrap his mind around everything that happened in the last 72 hours. From the miserable flop of a show to the heart-stopping, lung-choking moment he realized Bucky was missing in action, from the rush of endless darkness beneath his feet as he jumped off of Stark’s plane to the desperate confused rush of the fight in the HYDRA complex, from finding Bucky lying strapped to that damned table, so beaten and fragile and _alive_ , to the terrifying incredible leap across a literal pit of fire, from walking all the way back from Austria with a hundred men at his back to arriving to a hero’s welcome… The sudden transition from dancing monkey to the hero of the front has left him reeling, lost and confused and uncertain in his own standing.

Steve pauses outside the Colonel’s tent, suddenly nervous for no evident reason. The man himself said there would be no need for disciplinary action, which means Steve doesn’t have to worry about that, but still… He knows well that Phillips has never been particularly fond of him, and he’s certainly never been voluntarily summoned to his tent. Faced now with the closed flap of Phillips’ tent, he has no idea what might be waiting for him inside.

“I can hear you breathing out there, Rogers,” Phillips’ voice rings out suddenly. “Stop dithering and get in here. I don’t have all day to sit around waiting on you.”

Steve jumps about a foot in the air and then glances around sheepishly, praying no one else was around to witness his embarrassment. With a final deep breath, he straightens his back and squares his shoulders before entering. “Sir,” he greets, falling into his best parade rest. “You asked for me?”

“I did, actually,” another voice says from his right. Steve barely stops himself from jumping again, his senses still on high alert. Howard Stark steps forward from the shadows in the corner of the tent, where he was doing his best impression of a standing lamp or a particularly realistic statue. “You know how the Army is, all secrets and classified information. Well actually, this is the SSR, which if you can believe it is even worse. I guess you’d know, since all that—” he gestures vaguely down the entire length of Steve’s body, “—is courtesy of the SSR. Anyway, you like shields?”

Steve stares blankly, even more baffled than he already was ten seconds ago. It’s a lot to keep up with Howard Stark on a normal day, but now—when his mind’s already in overdrive trying to process all that’s happened—Steve has no idea what to make of the words falling rapidfire out of Stark’s mouth, or the sudden and often untraceable leaps he makes between thoughts. Thankfully, Stark seems either blithely ignorant or purposefully negligent of Steve’s confusion, and barrel right on without waiting for a response.

“Rhetorical question, by the way, I know you like shields. Peggy told me you were gonna run off with just a flimsy little tin toy until she knocked some sense into you. I got a fancy shield I want you to test. You in?”

Steve nods, just a little bit hesitant. He’s still unsure what exactly is going on here, but he certainly can test a shield for Stark. Especially if it’s something connected to the SSR, and maybe even Peggy or Erskine.

“Great!” Stark says, loudly clapping his hands together. “If you’ll come on over this way, we can go to my portable lab, which is much more conducive to scientific experiments than this place, and we can…”

“Get out of here, both of you,” Phillips cuts him off, practically shooing them out of his tent. “Rogers, please keep Stark busy for at least a few hours so I can get some damn work done around here.”

Stark walks out gladly, snapping a mock salute over his shoulder as he leaves. Steve pauses long enough to muster up a proper salute before he hurries to follow the man across the camp.

A few minutes later, he finds himself in a large space that reminds him vaguely but uncomfortably of the HYDRA facility he just escaped. The ceilings are high and cavernous, the lights just a little dim, and the shelves and racks and tables are strewn with endless gadgets he can’t begin to comprehend. Stark takes him all the way towards the back, past the rows of tables and high-tech weaponry, to a table in the corner. It’s laden with various shield prototypes, from lightweight to heavy duty, from circular to square. Steve is too busy staring at it all—especially the one that looks like an oversized gas mask in shield form—that he almost misses it when Stark pulls out yet another shield from the pile of unmarked boxes pushed against the wall. This one is surprisingly simple by comparison to the rest, just a round disk of faintly-gleaming metal inlaid with a pattern of three concentric circles.

“This beauty is pure vibranium,” Stark declares, gently laying it on the table with something akin to a caress. “Rarest metal on Earth. Also happens to be the strongest metal. Practically unbreakable, impenetrable, whatever you want. Can’t even make a scratch on it, not even with my strongest weapons. Plus, it absorbs all vibrational forces it comes in contact with. In short—the perfect weapon, offensive or defensive.”

Steve looks at the shield, lying so innocuous and benign upon the table, wondering how something so apparently simple could hold so much power. He reaches out for it, running a finger across the smooth surface. His hand curls around the edges almost unconsciously, and he’s about to lift it when he pauses, glancing up at Stark.

“Go ahead, she’s all yours,” Stark says with a nod. “Well, for the next hour or two anyway. Just be careful with it—it can behave… oddly, shall we say.”

Steve heaves it off the table; the shield is surprisingly light, despite being a hunk of pure metal, and he almost overbalances with the excessive force he put in. He gives it a few twirls in his hand, flipping it forward and back, just trying to get a sense of its weight and size. When he threads his right arm through the twin leather straps in the back, it settles easily against his muscles, strangely familiar despite his never having seen it before, much less held it against. He swings his arm around, mimicking punches and blocks, and the shield moves effortlessly with him, feeling almost weightless. Lifting his arm to the level of his neck allows him to cover most of his face and chest, and Steve pauses there a moment, considering.

“C’mon, let me show you what it can really do,” Stark interrupts. He pulls back the heavy black curtain blocking off a corner of the lab, revealing what looks like a very large metal box with a glass window. “Four-inch steel walls, reinforced observation window, and a whole lot of custom made Stark-special machinery,” he says, patting the metal wall with pride. The clanging sound echoes oddly inside the chamber, muted and distorted.

Steve stares at it quizzically, unconvinced and a little wary. Stark watches him for half a second and then adds, “It’s the best, most secure experiment space in the whole country. Nothing that happens in there can damage anything out here.” He turns back to the wall, and begins to fiddle with what looks like a series of complicated locks. After a few seconds, a hidden door opens with a quiet click. “C’mon, in you go,” Stark says, with a flourish of his arm.

Steve hesitates for just a moment, wondering what he might be getting himself into. Voluntarily walking into Stark’s metal chamber of experimental science feels a little bit like inviting a flashy-and-potentially-dangerous-but- _probably_ -not-deadly disaster into his near future. But then, he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on that front, does he? It was only a few months ago that he let himself be strapped into another, much smaller metal box of Stark’s design—and that seems to have turned out pretty well so far. If the serum and Vita Rays didn’t kill him, playing around with a metal shield the size of an overlarge dinner plate probably won’t, either.

There’s a voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Bucky, warning him not to do anything extraordinarily stupid; he reminds it forcefully that he already survived Project Rebirth—which Bucky would definitely count as “extraordinarily stupid”—without which Bucky would still be on that godforsaken table.

“Chop chop,” Stark prods, shaking Steve from his reverie. “I _am_ a busy man, you know. Don’t have all day to spend standing around waiting for a showgirl-turned-hero to get moving.”

Steve scowls at Stark, mostly because something in him can’t let a statement like that slide unchallenged, and then steps into the chamber. Behind him, the door slides closed with a clang that echoes loudly. Steve walks a few paces around the space, surprised to find it much roomier than it appeared from the outside.

A muted thumping noise draws his attention, and Steve turns his head to the observation window to find Stark with his face and hands plastered against the glass. “Can you hear me?” Stark asks, his voice muffled but clear.

“Yeah!” Steve yells back, then winces as his own voice echoes back to him, magnified by the reflective walls.

“No need to shout, Rogers,” Stark tells him, smirking. “I can hear you loud and clear. Well, maybe not loud, and not exactly the clearest either—but I can hear you well enough, and that’s what matters.”

Steve stands in the middle of the room and swings his arm back and forth, still trying to learn the way the weight and drag of the shield affects his movements. It may be lighter than expected, slicing through the air with little resistance, but it’s still an unfamiliar addition his right arm, and he can feel the weight of it—and the sudden imbalance of his left and right arm—pulling subtly but perceptibly at the muscles of his shoulder and back. “Impenetrable, you said?” he asks.

“Precisely,” Stark answers, dragging out each syllable in exaggeration. “Here, let me show you.” He presses a few buttons, and suddenly a panel in the far wall slides open to reveal a revolver pointed straight at Steve’s face. Steve barely has time to duck and hide his face and chest behind the protective disk of the shield before six shots ring out, echoing loudly in the walled-off space. He flinches, bracing himself for the burn of bullets piercing skin, but each shot merely bounces harmlessly against the surface of the shield. In fact, Steve can hardly feel the impact of the bullets, even though the dull ping of metal-on-metal under the deafening roar of gunshot tells him the shots are certainly hitting the shield.

Once silence settles again, and the smell of gunpowder clears a little from the air, Steve turns to glare at Stark through the window. “You just _shot_ at me!” he shouts, pointing an accusing finger at Stark’s infuriatingly unperturbed face. “Are you completely _mad_?”

“Brilliant observation, Rogers,” Stark drawls, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “ _Really_ , I hadn’t noticed. As for your question, though, the jury’s still out. Give the Army a couple more months and they might have an answer for you.”

“What if the shield hadn’t worked? Or the bullets ricocheted?” Steve presses. His heart is still pounding in his chest, each beat loud and panicked in his own ears.

“Oh please, you think I just give people experimental weapons that I haven’t thoroughly tested myself?” Stark says, indignant. “I’ve already tried firing my most powerful weapons at this shield, and it’s still as pristine as the day I first held it in my hands. Take a look for yourself, Rogers. You were completely safe.”

Steve crouches down to pick up one of the bullets that have scattered by his feet. The shell is malformed, compressed and twisted where it hit the shield. And yet, when he slides the shield off his arm and flips it around, he can’t find the smallest divot to mark where the shot might have hit. “That’s… that’s impressive,” he admits, a little awed by the evidence in front of his eyes—and a little sheepish over his outburst. “But still, a little warning would’ve been nice, Stark. Besides, didn’t you say yourself that the shield behaves oddly?”

“Before we go on, I just have to point out the hilarious irony of all this outrage from a man who was happy to waltz into enemy territory with a tin foil prop shield and jump out of an airplane,” Stark says. “But to address your question—that’s not what I meant when I said it’s a little odd. Give her a throw and you’ll see what I mean.”

Steve looks down at the shield in his hands, confused and considering, and then grips in firmly in his right hand. When he looks up again, the revolver is gone and another hidden panel has opened—this time from the ceiling—to lower a red-and-white target a few yards away from him. Steve takes a deep breath, trying to remember all the things Bucky taught him about throwing a baseball back on the Brooklyn streets—though he’s not sure how well the skill transfers from a tiny ball that fits in his hand to a metal disk three times the size of his head, not that he was ever that skilled at throwing a baseball anyway—and then lauches it with all his might. The shield whizzes off, almost too fast to see, and then bounces off the target with a loud crash before rushing back towards him. Steve ducks in a panicked rush, taken off guard by the sheer speed of the shield, and hears it ricocheting several times against the metal walls of the room in the corner behind him before finally clattering to a stop.

“Maybe not that hard next time,” Stark suggests over the dying echoes of the clatter, but it’s not hard to tell that he’s barely holding back laughter. “I know you weighed ninety pounds soaking wet for most of your life, but now you’re a two-hundred-pound chunk of super soldier muscle, and even my superior technology might not hold up if you throw stuff at it that hard.”

Steve scowls and makes a particularly rude gesture with his hand before walking over to the corner to pick up the shield from the ground. This time, he takes another deep breath and tries to throw it gently and lightly. It still soars away faster than he expects it too, but at least this time he’s not so surprised that he has to duck to avoid it. Instead, he reaches out a hand to catch it as it rushes past him, his fingertips just barely latching on to the rim of the shield. “What’s that you said about the shield behaving oddly?” he asks, as he prepares himself to give it another throw.

“Just toss her around a few more times,” Stark says. There’s a low, mechanical whir, and then half a dozen more targets drop down from the ceiling, scattered around the entire space.

Steve tries to gauge the distance between him and the second-nearest target, lines up his aim the best he can, and throws; the shield hits the target dead center and soars back to him. He repeats that throw several times, and then moves on to the next target, a few feet further down the room. And again, and again, until he’s hit all seven targets at least three or four times each. In fact, by the fourth time he throws at the farthest target, Steve almost feel like he could hit it blindfolded—and the shield flies back into his arms with perfect accuracy, almost like a bird homing in on its prey. “Still not sure what you mean, Stark,” he calls out, spinning the shield a few times in his hands. “It seems perfectly fine to me.”

“Shush and let me do some math for a second,” Stark says, sounding preoccupied. Surprised by the dismissal, Steve looks over at the observation window, only to find Stark bent over what looks like a notebook, scribbling furiously. “That’s what I thought, but it makes no sense…” Stark mutters, and then taps the glass as he looks up again. “Throw it at that last target a few more times, Rogers. I want to check something.”

Obediently, Steve slings the shield at the prescribed target repeatedly, until finally Stark interrupts, “That’s enough; I think I have all the data that I need.” When Steve looks over, the man is still writing furiously in his notebook, a frown digging grooves in between the lines of his brow.

“You gonna tell me what’s up?” Steve prods, slowly but increasingly growing alarmed. “Is there some kind of a problem?”

“Depends on your definition of problem,” Stark replies, which is entirely unhelpful and doesn’t help resolve Steve’s confusion or alarm one bit. Steve is about to remind him of that when Stark finally looks up from his papers. “When I said the shield behaves oddly, I meant it doesn’t follow any laws of motion or physics as we know them—which is to say, it basically breaks all the known rules of the universe. It just doesn’t move as it should. One of my machines would throw it at a wall, and it would just drop to the ground on impact; I’d do it again, and it would bounce around the whole room ten times before stopping.”

“It seems to be working fine for me…?” Steve questions uncertainly.

“Well, sort of,” Stark replies. “If by “working fine” you mean it’s doing what you want it too, then yes. But if you mean it’s doing what any other metal disk like that _should_ be doing, then no. You’re good, Rogers, and Erskine’s serum might be helping you, but you’re still human. You don’t have perfect accuracy—but the shield is acting like you do.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Steve admits, feeling a groove appearing between his brows to mirror the one still on Stark’s face.

“In simple terms? The shield appears to be correcting the errors in your throw and going where you _mean_ to throw it to, instead of where your arms actually does throw it to.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“I would’ve said that ten minutes ago, too, but that’s what the math says.”

“So… what are you saying? That it’s magic? That’s completely impossible.”

“Don’t act so surprised, it’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen—or you, for that matter, Mr. Magic Serum Super Soldier. Didn’t you just fight a man with a literal red skull for a face? But no, it’s not magic, not _that_ way; that doesn’t exist. It might be some esoteric property of vibranium that we don’t understand yet—it’s the rarest metal on Earth, after all, it’s not like we’ve had a lot of opportunity to examine and test it. Maybe something about it is interacting with the serum in your veins, or the Vita Rays that changed your cells. We won’t know for sure until we do more testing.”

Stark presses a few buttons, and another handful of shields appears from the ceiling. He gestures at them, a little impatiently. “Testing, Rogers, let’s go. That shield’s not gonna throw itself.”

For the next two hours, Steve throws the shield more times that he cares to count. They try it at one target, then richoceted off two targets, then three and four and five; each time, after a few initial stumbles, Steve nails it with perfect accuracy without fail. They even try throwing blindfolded, which makes Steve feel like an utter fool flailing in the darkness, but apparently doesn’t decrease the accuracy of his hits one bit according to Stark.

Finally, Stark throws up his arms. “I hate saying this, but I have no idea what’s going on. I mean, I’ve thrown everything I can think of at you and that shield, and you’re still throwing perfectly.” Stark shakes his head, a mix of frustration and resignation in the lines of his face. “We just don’t understand enough about vibranium, or what the serum and Vita Rays did to your body.”

The door slides open, and Steve walks out of the experiment chamber with a sigh. He feels like his arm should be exhausted, like the muscles should be aching and ready to fall off, but truth be told he feels like he could keep throwing for another two hours and be unfazed. The lack of exhaustion is almost as uncomfortable, and certainly more disconcerting, than the exhaustion itself would have been. He slides the shield off his arm and goes to set it down on the table, but Stark waves him off tiredly.

“Just take it,” he says. “You’re the only one in this entire country who seems to know how to use it. I’ll tell the SSR… I don’t know, something. I’ll tell them we determined it matches well with the effects of the super soldier serum, or some bullshit like that. That shield in your hands is one of the most perfect weapons in this entire war; someone should use it, even if I don’t understand why you can. Just don’t tell anyone about this—I don’t need the SSR breathing down my neck, and you certainly don’t need to give some crazed power hungry Germans yet another reason to come after you. ”

Stark turns back to his notebook with a perfunctory wave goodbye in Steve’s direction. Steve stares down at the shield, whose shape and weight have somehow grown familiar in the last few hours. As he walks out, the leather straps of the shield snug and comfortable against his right forearm, he can’t help a grin spreading across his face despite all of it. 

He has a new weapon now, one that only he can use.

* * *

Steve lasts four whole days before cracking and telling Bucky, which he thinks is an achievement worthy of the highest commendations. After all, he's entirely unused to keeping anything a secret from Bucky. In fact, Bucky was always the first to know everything in his life—when he lost his first tooth, when he came down with yet another cold, when he got in a fight with the Pickering boys down the block, when his Ma died... The only time he'd ever tried to keep a secret was when he was sixteen, slowly and confusedly realizing that no pretty girl around town charmed him as much as Bucky's wide shoulders, his swaggering walk, his cocky grin. He managed to hold onto the words for two whole weeks back then, and he thought he'd been doing a pretty good job of acting normal, too—until one day Bucky came home, sat down heavily on his bed, and said: "You gonna tell me what's up, Stevie, or am I gonna have to play guessing games for two more weeks?" And well, Steve had never been able to lie in the face of Bucky's earnest eyes. "I think I like you!" he burst out, not even two seconds later, and then cringed in the face of Bucky's surprised frown. "I mean... I think I like you, the way you... the way you like dames," he finished, unable to back down once he’d started. For a moment, Bucky's face morphed into something darker, unhappier, and Steve closed his eyes, wondering what irreparable harm he might have done with his words. But suddenly, there were strong arms around his chest, and a pair of soft lips so terribly close to his neck. "You damn punk," Bucky breathed into his left ear, the good one, and then his lips were on Steve's neck, and then... and then that was that.

The weight of this secret felt ridiculously light compared to that. If anything, it was harder to keep in because it didn't feel like a secret, because it was the kind of thing he would normally rush to tell Bucky as soon as he could. He can feel the words dancing on his tongue, eager and impatient, just waiting for a moment private enough to come tumbling out like treacherous breaths.

His task of secrecy is made easier by the fact that he rarely sees Bucky at all for those four days. At first, he doesn't notice; he's so busy now, dragged from one meeting to another as the Army tries to take advantage of his newfound herodom. It takes a lot out of Steve, too, adjusting to the sudden if welcome change from dancing monkey to saviour of the front. There's Phillips, demanding that he come in for the third strategy session of the day; there's Peggy, asking to see him for both official and unofficial purposes; there's Stark, always coming up with new experiments to do with the shield and other mystery tools. (He doesn't hit it off with anything else as well as he first did with the shield, but so far, that fact has done nothing to stem the flow of Stark's ideas and suggestions.) There's new uniforms, and new weapons, and new titles. There's a new team that he's supposed to have in a week or so. Everything is changing at once, and it's a little overwhelming, to say the least.

Perhaps that's enough of an excuse for the fact that he doesn't realize Bucky's been avoiding him for three whole days.

It's at the end of the third day, when he's collapsed tired and exhausted into his bed at half past two in the morning, that he finally figures it out. He thought that Bucky was asleep when he came in—as any sane, self-respecting man is bound to be at this hour—but then he hears the way Bucky's breath stops, for just a moment. A second later, it evens out into a suspiciously still and calm rhythm, which may have been enough to fool anyone else. But Steve has been sleeping next to Bucky for years now, sharing a bed as often as not, and he's as intimately familiar with the light, hitching snores of Bucky's sleep as he is with the irregular gasps of his own straining, asthmatic lungs. Bucky's refusing to acknowledge Steve, choosing to pretend to be asleep instead of so much as greeting him. It feels like rejection, and stabs a pang of hurt deep in Steve's chest. In a moment of sudden clarity, Steve realizes that he hasn't spoken more than ten words to Bucky since they got back to the camp. He'd thought he was just busy, and that Bucky probably was too—healing from his injuries and reconnecting with his friends in the regiment, perhaps—but in the light of this moment, the whole situation changes meaning. Bucky's been avoiding him, and the last thought Steve has before the demands of his body takes him under into sleep is to find out why as soon as he can.

Of course, by the time he wakes up the next morning—0700 sharp, far too early for the late night that he had, but Phillips has no pity to spare for for late-night sessions with Stark—Bucky's already gone. Steve stares at the empty cot for a helpless moment, even reaching out a desperate hand to pat at the bedding as if it might provide him with hidden clues. The fabric is long cold, without the least trace of the warmth of Bucky's body, and doesn't answer any of the questions clamouring loud and confused in his mind.

The rest of the day passes in a confused haze; he walks into meetings and holds conversations like a passing ghost in human form. His mind is too busy running in circles to focus on anything else. Why is Bucky avoiding him? Did he do something to upset or scare Bucky? Is this new body, with its strange new muscles and scientific enhancements, the final straw to push Bucky away? Each thought, each fear makes his heart pound a little faster and his shoulders sag a little deeper. By the evening, even Phillips has caught on that Steve's mind is not on the tasks at hand, and he dismisses Steve for the day with a gruff command to be more present tomorrow.

Steve takes the reprimand without blinking. The dismissal means that he might have an evening free for himself, for the first time since he returned from Azzano. It means time that he can spend talking to Bucky, coaxing out the reason for his avoidance. It takes all of his restraint not to go sprinting out of the meeting room as soon as Phillips lets him go; only the thought of the possibility of future consequences, for both him and Bucky, keeps him there long enough to walk away with some modicum of dignity.

As soon as he's out in the open air of the camp again, Steve's feet itch to take him to Bucky—and that's when he realizes that he has no idea where to go. He's been making assumptions about where Bucky must be: at the medic's tent, getting patched up, or in training, or on patrol, or somewhere getting his meal. He realizes with a start that he really, truly has no idea what Bucky's been doing for the last four days. The thought sits uncomfortable like stones in his belly, and stokes the flames of worry he can feel building under his temples. He spends a precious half hour asking after Bucky from everyone he can find, each question feeling like barbs under his skin. He used to know exactly where Bucky was, no matter what. He used to be the one who could find Bucky, even when he was sulking away from home or sneaking out of his classes. He used to be the one people asked for Bucky's whereabouts, but now here he is, asking everyone else where Bucky might be.

In the end, it's one of the other soldiers Steve freed from Azzano—Dugan, he thinks the man's name is—that points Steve to a bar a few minutes' walk down from the camp. Steve thanks him quickly but sincerely, then goes racing down the path. Heads turn as he pass, alarm written clear in the lines of the faces, and Steve forces himself to slow his pace to a fast walk to avoid causing an unnecessary uproar back in the camp.

The five minutes that it takes him to walk to the bar feels like an entire hour. And yet, when he finally enters the bar and finds Bucky nursing a beer alone on a barstool in the back, he finds his feet suddenly rooted to the spot. For the first time in his life, he doesn't know what to say to Bucky. His feet drag forwards almost without his consent, tugged hypnotically and instinctively towards Bucky, even as his mind flails and falters. He comes to a stop, perhaps three steps away from where Bucky is sitting, and just stares.

"I can hear you breathing," Bucky finally says, after several endless moments of heavy silence. "Stop standing there like a dumb tree and sit down, Stevie."

Steve's body moves to follow, even as his mind flinches away from all the unfamiliar shadows in Bucky's voice. He sits down heavily on the stool next to Bucky, almost falling into the seat. "I missed you," he blurts out, without thought. It isn't what he meant to say, not by a long shot, but he feels just how true it is now that the words are out in the air. He missed Bucky, so damn much. Back in Brooklyn, yes, where the tiny apartment suddenly felt too large and the bed too empty. On tour with the USO girls, every time one would look at him with the kind of appreciation he's used to seeing directed at Bucky. And here, these last few days, when he finally had Bucky near but couldn't seem to find two spare moments together. "I missed you a lot," he repeats, just to give more breath to the words.

"I'm right here, punk," Bucky says, but his words lack all heat. "Don't make sense to be missing a person who's sitting right next to you."

"But I haven't seen you in almost a week," Steve counters, an embarrassing hint of a whine in his voice.

"You're a busy man, Captain America," Bucky responds. There's something dark in the way he says _Captain America_ , something almost bitter, and it scrapes against Steve's ears. "Seems like everyone wants a minute with you these days."

"I always got a minute for you, Buck," Steve says, and it suddenly feels like they're not just talking about time and busyness anymore. "Hell, I even got two whole minutes for you if you want 'em. C'mon, what's got you sitting here all lonesome? Thought you'd be in camp charming Peggy or somethin'."

"'S nothing, Stevie," Bucky says, turning his head back to stare at the empty glass in his hands. "'S nothing. Not worth worrying yourself over."

"Hey, anything that worries you is worth me worrying over," Steve responds. Bucky's face is shadowed now, hidden away from the slanting evening night, and Steve hates the way it makes it impossible to see his expression. "'Sides, you took all the stupid with you. It'll help to have some brains to do the thinking."

Bucky snorts, a quiet sound, but doesn't say anything. The shadow on his face darkens, shrouding the sharp, strong lines of his jaw and cheekbones in obscurity. Steve's fingers long to reach out, to pull away the shadows from his face and drag him back into the light.

"Hey, have you seen that new shield Stark gave me?" Steve asks, suddenly desperate to say something, anything, to break the silence and draw Bucky away from whatever it is that has his eyes so grey and his shoulders so heavy.

“No, I somehow missed the giant metal dinner plate rolling around in our tent for the last three nights,” Bucky says, a bite of sarcasm in his voice.

“Yeah, well, it’s not just a dinner plate,” Steve responds. “It’s way better than that, I swear.”

“What, like that tin foil sheet your dumb ass brought to a HYDRA camp?” Bucky shoots back. “I swear, Stevie, sometimes I wonder how all that stupid hasn’t killed you yet.”

“Okay, I admit that wasn’t my brightest moment,” Steve acquiesces easily. It’s true, after all, but more importantly, he’s desperate to keep Bucky talking. As long as they were speaking, the sudden gap that’s opened up between them like a yawning abyss seems less intraversible. “But this, this is the real deal. Pure vibranium.”

“What the hell is that?” Bucky asks. There’s a bit of a twinkle in his eyes, a shadowed hint of the same excited curiosity that propelled him to every Stark Fair in New York, and it makes something in Steve’s chest loosen to see it.

“Strongest metal on Earth, or so Stark told me,” Steve explains. “It’s basically indestructible! You could throw a dozen grenades at this thing and it wouldn’t have a scratch.”

“And you’ve tested this first-hand, I assume?” Bucky demands. There’s something sharp in his voice behind the innocuous words, an edge Steve’s used to hearing a thousand times. It’s the same tone with which Bucky would say, “Let me guess. You just _had_ to punch a guy because he was being an ass,” every time he found Steve bruised up with bleeding knuckles and a busted lip.

“....Not with a _dozen_ grenades,” Steve answers sheepishly, avoiding eye contact. Bucky doesn’t need to know about the half-dozen bullets, or the handful of grenades, or the flamethrower, or that fancy experimental weapon of Stark’s…. Besides, that’s all Stark’s fault, not his.

Bucky groans, long and theatrical. “What am I gonna do with you, Stevie?”

“Shut up, you jerk,” Steve says, shoving playfully against Bucky’s shoulder. “The _important_ point here is that I’ve got an unbeatable weapon, and no one can steal it from me because I’m the only one who can use it.”

“What does that mean?” Bucky asks, a confused frown forming on his eyebrows. “You’re the only one who can use it?”

 _Oops_. “I… I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” Steve hedges cautiously.

Bucky’s eyes immediately cloud over, and his face shutters off more quickly than Steve thought possible. “Of course. Army secrets. Bet Captain America’s got a lot of those. Forget I asked.”

The way Bucky says the words _Captain America_ digs in like barbs under Steve’s skin. It’s not like there’s any venom or contempt in them, but there’s a darkness, a heavy shadow of some sort that Steve finds he can’t quite place. He hates that he can’t identify it, almost as much as he hates the darkness itself. “I… oh, fuck it,” Steve says, shaking his head.

Bucky raises his eyebrows, at once skeptical and questioning.

“Stark told me not to tell anyone, but honestly, who’s Stark to order me around? I’ve probably already told you more than I’m supposed to, anyway. Stark wouldn’t explain much to me, but he said the shield is magical or something—doesn’t move the way it’s supposed to, breaks the laws of physics as we know it, all of that stuff. No one could figure out how to use it, but uh, it works fine for me. Better than fine, even. It self-corrects or something like that, goes where I _mean_ to throw it even when my aim is off. Stark thinks it has to do with the serum, although even he admitted he’s not so sure.”

There’s a long pause, while Bucky stares at Steve with an inscrutable expression. He opens his mouth a few times, but then shakes his head and goes back to staring silently. Finally, he heaves out a gusty sigh, and speaks. “So,” he says slowly. “Let me get this straight. You let a crazy scientist pump you full of blue serum that’s never been tested before, and then you walked into an actual fucking HYDRA facility with a tin foil shield and no military experience, and _then_ you let Stark play target practice with a brand new shield and a bunch of fancy weapons—and you found out that the magical stuff in your body that no one understands makes you good at working with the magical shield that no one understands?”

“Well, it sounds dumb when you put it like that,” Steve says, letting an undertone of a whine creep into his voice. As he hoped, it makes the corners of Bucky’s lips twitch in the beginnings of a smile, although it dies before blossoming into a full smile.

“Well, buddy,” Bucky says, throwing back the last of his beer. “I’m gonna need another drink to wrap my head around that mess.” He gestures for the bartender for two more beers. “And you’re buyin’, Mr. hero with a fancy new shield.”

“You’re a real jerk, Buck, you know that?” Steve says, but the supposed barb of his words is entirely undermined by the laugher that follows.

“Punk,” Bucky responds, easy and affectionate. The shadows are still there in his eyes, lurking in the corners and in places where Steve can’t see or reach—but for a moment, in the dim light, he looks just like he did before he shipped off: cocky and young and so, so beautiful.

Steve just barely restrains himself from reaching out to kiss Bucky; the clink of a pair of full beer glasses being dropped on the wood of the bar reminds him of the very public company they’re currently in. But under the edge of the bar, in the protective shadow, he places his hand gently on top of Bucky’s. He’s half afraid that Bucky will discreetly move his hand, or even flinch away—but instead, Bucky slowly turns his hand around so their palms are touching, and laces their fingers together gingerly.

It feels like more of a victory than walking into the camp with a regiment’s worth of rescued prisoners of war behind him ever did.

* * *

Steve was a fool to ever think the Howling Commandos wouldn’t jump on the story of his special magical shield. All it takes is one drunken night—a few beers can’t get Steve drunk anymore, but that doesn’t stop the rest of them from dragging him out to bars with them on every leave and after every successful mission—and Bucky spills the beans for all of them to hear. It’s peppered between endless embarrassingly embellished stories of his mishaps back in Brooklyn, and Bucky’s smart and careful enough not to tell them _everything_. But the Commandos are a smart, rowdy bunch, and they pick up enough from the story to decide that it’s the prime target to tease Steve with.

It also somehow becomes a game that Steve’s sole command of the shield must be challenged at every possible opportunity. Playfully, jokingly, and often drunkenly, but challenged nonetheless.

It first happens in the middle of the snowy night in the forest somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of what used to be the border between Germany and Austria. The air is colder than anything Steve’s ever felt, but they’re at least a hundred miles deep in enemy territory and can’t risk a fire for fear of the smoke giving away their presence. So instead, they’re wrapped up in as many layers of clothing as they have, stuffed two-in-a-sleeping-bag to maximize shared body heat, and huddled together like a pack of pathetic wolf cubs shivering in the cold. Steve keeps moving from person to person, trying to keep everyone warm with the little bit of extra body heat the serum gives him.

Eventually, when the moon has sunk and a few dim stars are fighting to illuminate the night sky through the layer of oppressive clouds, most of them manage to fall asleep with the exception of poor Falsworth, who’s the first on guard duty. Even Steve’s nearly indefatigable supersoldier body seems to be shutting down from the cold, and he nods off after making sure everyone’s as warm as they’re gonna get tonight.

An indeterminate amount of time later, he’s awoken by a hand determinedly shaking his shoulder. “Rogers,” a voice says, low but insistent. “Hey, Rogers! Steve! Wake up!”

“Hmm?” Steve responds, still more than halfway asleep.

“It’s your turn for guard duty,” the voice says.

Steve pries his eyes open to find a blurred face mere inches from his. A few slow blinks of his eyes, and the blurry colours resolve themselves into Dugan’s face. “Mmmmm,” Steve mumbles, utterly incoherent.

“Get up, you big lug, I’m cold,” Dugan says, pushing more insistently at Steve’s shoulder. “Barnes warned us that it’s a real struggle to wake you up, but by God, I did not expect you to be this horrible.”

“Hey!” Steve says, muzzy but slowly waking up properly. “‘M hurt. I’m not that bad.”

“Then get up and prove it, Captain,” Dugan says. “Or else… or else I’m gonna steal your shield!”

“Keep your grimy fingers off of her, she’s _mine_ ,” Steve says, forcing himself towards awareness.

“Ooooh, it’s a _she_ ,” Dugan teases, and ducks out of reach of Steve’s swatting hand. “You better hurry it up and get up, Rogers, or I just might steal your girl.”

Steve begins to untangle himself from the snare of his sleeping bag as quickly as he can without waking Bucky next to him. “Don’t you dare, Dugan,” he warns in a quiet hiss. “Besides, you can’t use it anyway. Stark told me I’m the only one who can.”

“I’m sure Stark’s told many people they’re special,” Dugan shoots back. “I’m sure he might have even meant it, a few times—but hey, only one way to make sure this was one of those times, right?” Taking advantage of the fact that most of Steve’s body is still trapped in the fabric of the sleeping bag, Dugan reaches out a rapid hand to pluck the shield from where it lies next to Steve’s body. Steve lets out an indignant squawk, but Dugan simply responds with a smirk and turns around. Just as Steve finally fights free of the overstuffed, overstretched sleeping bag, Dugan pulls his arm back as far as he can and launches the shield towards the nearest tree.

The shield flies for approximately two feet before plopping limply into the thick snow, more than ten yards short of the targeted tree. Dugan stares incredulously at the imprint of the shield buried in the snow, and then back at his hands; Steve snorts in amusement, and quickly shoves a hand in front of his mouth to stifle the rest of his laughter and avoid waking up the rest of the Commandos. Dugan shoots Steve a dirty look and retrieves the shield, grumbling the whole time under his breath.

“Tell no one about this,” Dugan mock-threatens as returns the shield to Steve and climbs into the relative warmth of the sleeping bag he’s sharing with Falsworth. “I swear, Rogers, if you so much as say a peep about it, I’ll dye your hair green in your sleep.”

Of course, five days later, they arrive back at the main base after yet another successful mission, and everyone except Steve gets drunk on celebratory rounds of beer. Six drinks in, Dugan tells the entire story himself, and after that, it became a sort of dare for everyone. On almost every other night, they start to play hit-that-tree with Steve’s shield, passing it around like a cheap bottle of moonshine. Occasionally, some of them manage to land it pretty close—Jones gets the shield within a foot of the tree, and Bucky even manages to graze a low-hanging branch at once point—but most of the time, the shield flies comically wide or falls comically short. That doesn’t seem to deter the Commandos one bit, though, and Steve laughs and watches on, despite all his exaggerated grumbling and complaints about being less popular than a hunk of metal.

Perhaps it’s this casual game that subconsciously gives Steve the idea three months later, in the middle of a particularly brutal fight. They’re in the middle of another HYDRA weapons warehouse, this one much better armed and manned than their information had suggested, and the Howling Commandos are outnumbered and nail-bitingly close to running out of ammunition. Steve, cornered between a rack of blue-glowing guns and a concrete wall, is far too poorly situated to hope to take out more than one person at a time with the shield. In the corner of his eyes, however, he sees Bucky being pushed towards the center of the warehouse as he fights a group of half-dozen HYDRA goons. Almost without thinking about it—if he hesitates, if he doubts too much, he’ll never make the throw—Steve knocks out two of the men trapping him and then slings the shield towards Bucky with a shout of his name.

Bucky looks up, surprised, and one of the HYDRA soldiers attempts to strike a fatal blow in Bucky’s moment of distraction. However, the shield comes flying from behind him and crashes into his head, sending him tumbling down. Bucky reaches out a quick hand and grasps the shield before it too tumbles to the ground, and takes advantage of the confused tangle of limbs caused by the fallen man to rapidly take down the other five in rapid succession.

Then, with a quick glance around the room, Bucky throws the shield in a wide arc to take down another half-dozen soldiers in one go. Instead of throwing it back to Steve afterwards, however, he sends it towards Falsworth; one neat bullet is all it takes to dispose of the man standing between him and Falsworth, and then the shield lands in Falsworth’s hands almost as if summoned precisely there by magic. Falsworth looks momentarily shocked and confused, but recovers quickly enough to use the shield to take out the handful of men around him.

The shield then travels to Morita’s hands, then Jones’, then Dugan’s, and then Dernier’s. By the time it finally returns to Steve, tracing a perfect arc from Dernier’s hands to Steve’s, no HYDRA goon is left standing. They stare at each other for a moment, panting hard from exertion, trying collectively to come to terms with both the terrifying closeness of the battle, and the meaning of the unexpected but successful shield-sharing.

When they get back to the safety of allied territory, Steve’s as impatient as the rest of them to test the shield again. Was the fight a one-time event, some series of happy, miraculous coincidences that saved their lives? Or did it unlock some hidden potential, some secret of the shield’s powers that they hadn’t known before?

For once, they head out into the forest surrounding the camp after being dismissed, instead of finding the shortest path to the nearest bar left standing. As soon as they’re far enough away from the camp to guarantee relative privacy through the trees, Steve sets the shield gently on the ground. “Who wants to go first?” he asks, into the uncharacteristic silence that’s fallen over them.

“I’ll go,” Bucky says, after a prolonged moment of heavy stillness. He reaches out to pick up the shield, heaving it up with a low grunt of effort. Straps in hand, he swings his right arm a few times in practice before hurling it with all his might.

The shield soars, a beautiful smooth arc in the air, but misses the target tree by a foot to the right. A collective gasp breaks through the quasi-reverent silence they’ve fallen into. Bucky stares at the fallen shield for a minute, his body completely still and his eyes shadowed by something almost like betrayal. Then he shakes his head, chuckles quietly, and goes to retrieve the shield.

Morita’s the next to try, and then Dugan, and then Dernier. One by one, they all try once again to throw the shield. One by one, they find that whatever sorcery or luck or divine intervention that allowed them to use it in the middle of a desperate battle has long since dissipated. Steve is the last to pick it up, and he must be more shaken than he thinks, because even his throw wobbles and almost misses the tree.

They trudge back to the camp in silence, deep in confused thoughts no one dares to speak. Finally, when the first tents at the outskirts of the camp are in view, Jones breaks the silence. “Maybe it’s something about the rush of the battle,” he says, a little hesitant.

“Could be,” Morita agrees easily. “I mean, Steve has magic blue potion in his veins, right? Maybe that always keeps him in the same state that the rest of us are in during a fight.”

“If nothing else,” Falsworth adds, “the shield is _fucking heavy_. It might be that we need to be in the thick of a fight, too busy trying to survive to worry about the weight of it, in order to use it well.”

“Makes sense,” Steve says, nodding. It does make sense, in a roundabout sort of way. It’s reasonable enough that Steve finds it hard to argue against it—and it’s not like he has a better answer, anyway.

And if the explanation feels a little forced, a little vague, none of them ever question it out loud, perhaps because none of them can come up with a better answer, either.

* * *

The end of this infernal war is almost in their fingers, so close that Steve can practically see it shimmering on the distant horizon. However, before the horizon—before the victory and the going home—there lies a deep ravine and a soaring Alps mountain to overcome.

When Dernier confirms that the incoming train does in fact contain Zola, something in Steve's chest tightens. This is it. There, on that train, sits the Red Skull's right hand, the man behind much of the worst atrocities he's seen, the man responsible for the shadows in Bucky's once-clear eyes that Steve still can't get used to. There, on that train, is the final key they need to crack wide open all the secrets that the Red Skull has, and take him down once and for all. Zola, and then the Red Skull, and then victory.

As distant thunder of the rushing train—too faint yet to reach the other Commandos' unenhanced ears—comes hurtling closer, Steve looks down over the edge of the cliff they're standing on. He can practically hear Bucky tensing up behind him, and he stifles an inappropriate laugh. He's six feet tall and two hundred pounds of pure, scientifically-maintained muscle, and Bucky's still worrying about him stepping too close to the edge of a rocky cliff to an anticlimactic and untimely death.

"Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?" Bucky asks, suddenly a mere half-step behind him. There's a bit of a shake in his voice, too well-hidden for anyone but Steve to notice, but Steve doesn't call him out on it. If Bucky wants to calm pre-mission nerves with sily reminiscing, then Steve won't deny him that.

"Yeah, and I threw up?" he answers easily. Bucky huffs a breathy laugh, and somewhere behind them both, he can hear the rest of the Howling Commandos chuckling as well. They're no strangers to tall tales of Steve's varied and neverending misadventures in New York, after all.

"This isn't payback, is it?" Bucky says, smacking lightly at Steve's shoulder.

"Now why would I do that?" Steve says, but he drawls out the syllables just enough to lace his sentence with sarcasm. Bucky shakes his head, another laugh tumbling from his lips, and that's more than worth the theatrics.

"The train's coming in fast," Dernier warns. "If we're gonna do this, we're gotta do it now."

"Alright, let's do this," Steve says, stepping away from both the cliff's edge and Bucky. His right side misses the familiar warmth of Bucky's body almost immediately, but he doesn't have time to indulge in it right now. He squashes down that sentimental part of him, stows it away into a corner of his mind where he can open it back up at a more convenient time, and forces his mind into mission-mode instead. "Remember, we have to do this perfectly. If we miss our landing, we're bugs on a windshield."

"Don't need to remind me," Jones says. "What you should remind me is who thought this was a good idea." Despite his outward complaints, though, he steps up behind Steve and Bucky.

Steve reaches up his arms, wrapping his hands tightly around the bars hanging there. He stares down at the length of the zipline stretching wide across the abyss to the other side, where the train tracks snake a winding path on the surface of the mountain. He takes a deep breath, adjusts his grip, and then launches himself forward at Dernier's signal.

The rush of the wind whipping across his face feels like fear and freedom at once. He stifles the strange urge to whoop like a child on a roller coaster. A distant corner of his mind wonders if this it what it feels like to be a bird in flight, but the majority of his mind is focused on the landing racing towards him. The cliffs on the other side of the abyss come rushing towards him at breakneck speed as he slides down the zipline, and beneath him, the train thunders ever closer. Steve stares intently, gauging the distance between him and the train as well as between him and the ever-approaching rock, and then leaps.

For one breath-stopping, heart-clenching moment, he thinks he missed—that his feet will fall into the gap between the cars, dropping him onto the train tracks to be crushed by the wheels of the rushing train. But he lands on the roof of the train with a thud, and rolls quickly to gain his balance. Behind him, he hears two, three, four similar thuds as Bucky and Jones and Falsworth make their landing as well. He spares a moment to glance behind him, checking in to make sure all of his men have landed safely, and then gives the sign to proceed into the train.

All it takes is a swing onto the side of the train, and one good kick against the door, and he's inside. Bucky follows, a second behind him. For a minute, the train is silent except for the dying echoes of the ruckus they made breaking in, and Steve thinks they might have been lucky enough to make it inside without detection. He leads the way through the body of the train, moving from car to car towards the front where all evidence indicates Zola will be seated. But as he crosses from the third car into the fourth, the door closes behind him with a loud clang, separating him and Bucky.

Steve spins around in a rush, his fingers sliding useless against the metal surface of the door. His eyes meet Bucky's, both of them a little panicked and terrified. He's about to try his luck at kicking in _this_ door, when Bucky's eyes suddenly goes even wider and he gestures urgently behind Steve. Steve turns back around just in time to find a HYDRA goon with one of those blue-glowing, Tesseract-powered weapons aimed straight at him. He barely has enough time to duck behind his shield before the weapon goes off, lighting up the entire car in a flash of blue-white light. As soon as the whir of the weapon's discharge dies down, Steve throws the shield as hard as he can; it hits the man square in the face and knocks him right out.

Steve blinks away the spots left behind by the blue light of the gun, only to be greeted by the sight of another HYDRA soldier, this time with a more conventional but no less deadly gun. He blocks the first dozen or so shots with the shield, and waits for the gun to run out of bullets. When the roar of the gun pauses briefly, and the man has to stop to reload or switch guns, Steve takes advantage of that split second of pause to run forwards, ramming the man against the other side of the car with as much speed as he can muster. They crash into the wall with a loud clang, and then the man slides down to the floor, unconscious. Steve glares at the fallen man, panting hard.

The muffled sound of gunfire catches his attention, and Steve rushes back to the doors that split him and Bucky apart. Through the window, he sees Bucky engaging with at least two different HYDRA goons. As he's watching, Bucky fires one-two-three shots; he pulls the trigger again, but the gun merely clicks, the chamber empty of bullets, and Bucky flings himself behind a stack of crates for cover. Steve can almost see the moment where Bucky decides that this must be his time, can see the terror and the resignation and the heartbreaking determination cross his face. Before Bucky can do something stupid like charge at the man weaponless, Steve scrambles to press the button to open the door between them. The hiss of sliding metal seems to surprise Bucky, and he looks up with wide eyes; when they land on Steve, something between relief and hurt crosses his face. Steve can't quite decipher what the emotion is, or what it might mean, but as much as he longs to understand it, they are a little pressed for time at the moment.

He tosses his spare gun at Bucky, and then gestures at him to draw the HYDRA goon to the other side of the car. Bucky nods firmly, takes a calming breath, and then throws himself out from his corner of safety, gun blazing. The HYDRA goon ducks, stepping sideways to try and avoid the bullets—but Steve is there waiting, and he slams into one of the crates with his shield, sending it careening straight into the man's body. He doesn't even have breath to make a sound as he goes down.

Steve reaches out a hand towards Bucky, patting him down briefly to check he isn't badly injured. Bucky shakes him off with an impatient wave of his arm, and opens his mouth to speak.

Something whirs behind them, and Steve only has time to whip his head around before the Tesseract weapon goes off. The world seems to slow down for a prolonged moment, and Steve watches helpless as a ray of blue light leaves the muzzle of the weapon and slams straight into Bucky's legs. Bucky falls like a crumpled paper doll, a shocked cry of pain on his lips.

The weapons whirs once more, preparing to discharge a second shot, but Steve can't hear it over the pounding beats of his heart. Bucky's injured, Bucky's down, Bucky might be— He cuts that thought off before it has chance to fully find words in his brain. It terrifies him even to think it. He thought once already that Bucky might be lost to him; he’s not sure he’s strong enough to face it a second time.

Instead of thinking about the heart-stopping possibilities, Steve turns fully towards the HYDRA goon. An unfamiliar wave of rage rushes through him like fire in his veins. It’s because of this man, this HYDRA soldier, this Nazi scum, that Bucky’s hurt. It’s because of him that Bucky’s crumbled there on the ground, terrifyingly still.

The man’s finger wraps around the trigger once more, ready to fire at Steve this time—but he never gets the chance.

The shield flies out of Steve’s hand, almost by its own will. It soars through the air faster than Steve’s ever thrown it before, fueled forwards perhaps by the sheer strength of the anger pounding in every muscle. It hits the man square in his chest, sending him tumbling down in a pile of black uniform and futuristic weaponry and dying blue light. Steve exhales a hard breath, his heart full of a bitter sort of satisfaction, and reaches out to grasp the shield on its rebound.

The shield does not return to Steve.

Instead, it bounces wide off the man’s chest, ricochets off a nearby crate, and then slams into the side of the car. The vibranium edge of the shield slices through the flimsy metal of the car wall like butter, ripping open a hole wide enough to encompass three men before finally clattering upon the floor. The rush of the air outside the train pulls on him with astounding force, and Steve’s forced to brace himself to avoid being sucked out.

But then there’s a surprised cry behind him, swallowed up rapidly by the wail of rushing air. Steve whirls around, and then his world stops.

Bucky is no longer there.

Steve doesn’t remember the handful of harried strides that carry him across the length of the destroyed train car to the yawning hole gaping in its side. Next thing he knows, he’s clinging to the edge of the torn-out wall, his eyes desperately seeking a familiar shape. When he sees Bucky, hanging on to a metal bar on the outer wall of the car, his heart leaps and clenches at once, unsure of what emotion he should be feeling more strongly. On the one hand, a shiver of relief races down his spine; Bucky is still _here,_ still alive, not long gone and out of reach. But on the other hand, his situation is so precarious, so dangerous, that he might be gone and out of reach any second now—and the mere thought of it makes his gut clench in terror.

“Bucky!” Steve shouts over the rush of the wind, the name leaping off his tongue in a desperate breath without conscious thought. Bucky looks up, his eyes wide and clear and terrified. Steve wants to jump to him, wants to fly out there to tug him off that edge and back into safety, wants to take Bucky’s place hanging on the side of a speeding train, but none of those urges can help them now. Instead, he plants his feet with all his might, grasps tight onto the thin edge of the wall, and stretches out the rest of his body as far as he possibly can. “Grab my hand!”

Bucky’s eyes are still terrified, but a flash of steely determination slides in behind the terror. Steve watches as he adjusts his grip on the precariously-attached metal bar and swings out a hand as far as he can. Their fingers strain towards each other, a mere inch away—but that inch might as well be a mile right now.

Bucky sways dangerously as his weight swings back away. Desperate and panicked, Steve edges his back foot a little closer to the edge of the car and reaches out once more, straining every protesting muscle and joint and bone to reach out just an inch further. “Come on!” he shouts, trying to will the distance between them to be shorter.

Bucky’s jaw tenses as he grits his teeth, and then with a grunt of effort, he swings himself back towards Steve. His arm stretches, strains, reaches—their fingers brush—

The metal bar detaches from the wall with a shrill creak.

Bucky falls.

* * *

Steve’s knife leaves his fingers, slicing through the air with deadly precision to embed itself into the chest of the last HYDRA goon left standing. The man tumbles off the walkway with a cut-off scream, but Steve doesn’t wait to watch or listen. He’s already gone, climbing over the rails on the side of the walkway to retrieve his shield where it’s lodged between two bomb-planes in the hold of the Valkyrie.

As he picks up the shield, Steve tries to shake off the sneaking doubt that something is wrong—that whatever made him able to wield the shield so well before is slipping away from him. He can still _use_ it, of course, and it still obeys his will—but not the way it did before. He can still hit his targets, but half the time now it doesn’t fly back to him the way it used to. Like in this fight, when he threw it in the face of two HYDRA goons, only to have to reach quickly for his knife when the shield went clattering into a corner instead of returning to his hands.

Maybe the serum is finally running out of juice, and in a month’s time he won’t be Captain America anymore. Maybe he’ll go back to Brooklyn, the same scrawny kid he was before Project Rebirth.

Except this time, he won’t have Bucky anymore.

Steve braces against the pang of sharp, incredulous pain that pierces his gut at the thought. He hasn’t wrapped his mind around it fully yet, keeps expecting to turn around and find Bucky at his six, or watching him through a sniper’s scope and protecting him like a guardian angel with particularly good aim. To be fair, it hasn't been very much time at all since Bucky— since the train. And they haven't even been able to go searching for Bucky in the bottom of that ravine. Zola's confessions revealed that Schmidt plans to attack too soon, and the Army command decided that it was more important and more urgent to stop the Red Skull than to retrieve the body of a fallen soldier. Steve knows that it's the rational decision—that's why he's here, after all, on the very plane that the Red Skull is flying on—but he can't help but resent the decision in a dark corner of his mind. Bucky gave everything, all of his strength and courage and loyalty to this Army, and they can’t even be bothered to find him after he fell.

Steve chases the circling thoughts away with a firm shake of his head. This is not the time to get distracted thinking about the shield or about Bucky. The sooner he takes down the Red Skull and finishes this mission, the sooner he can go back to looking for Bucky—and the sooner this damned war can be over. He takes two slow, calming breaths, then climbs into the body of the Valkyrie to confront the Red Skull once and for all.

Of course, it's never quite that easy. As soon as he steps onto the bridge, there’s a flash of blue—the same Tesseract-powered weapon that they’ve been fighting again and again—and he manages to cover himself with the shield just barely in the nick of time. The impact of the shot against the shield rattles up his arm and down his spine, and it’s only by the tips of his fingers that Steve stops himself from dropping the shield. Behind him, he can hear the weapon whirring again, and he spins around and throws the shield in the same motion. It flies off his hand in a graceful arc and slams into the Red Skull’s hands, forcing him to drop the weapon with a clatter. Unfortunately, the shield also bounces off at the wrong angle and crashes into the controls of the plane, ripping through the machinery in a shower of sparks. It slides off the destroyed surface of the control panel and disappears out of Steve’s view, leaving him weaponless as well.

The Red Skull’s face contorts in a mask of rage, made all the more monstrous by the gaunt skeletal look of his head. When he comes charging towards him with raised fists, Steve is ready: both feet planted firmly on the ground, his hands curled into a tight fist with his thumb down the way Bucky taught him all those years ago. He dodges the incoming punch neatly, and land a hit of his own against the Red Skull's stomach. Schmidt retaliates with a hard kick against Steve's shins, nearly sending him down on collapsed knees. Steve aims a kick of his own, trying to sweep out the Red Skull's feet from under him; Schmidt is too strong, though, and Steve manages only to shake the man on his feet a little.

The world narrows down into nothing but a flurry of limbs after that: a kick here, a punch there, a block on the left and a dodge to the right. It's the first time since receiving the serum, since stepping into this new and powerful body, that Steve's gone up against an enemy who's actually an equal match for him. It's almost disconcerting; for all that he's used to being terribly, hopelessly outmatched in all those fights when he was ninety pounds soaking wet, he's also not used to this body being met blow for blow. He finds himself out of breath for almost the first time in this new, miraculous body of his.

In the end, it's an accident, almost pure luck, that brings their fight to an end. He's too well-matched with Schmidt, and the fight feels like it's going to go on forever until one of them drops out of sheer exhaustion. They jostle their way across the plane, trading blows and parries. There's a split second of an opportunity when the Red Skull pauses to catch a breath and perfect his aim for the next hit, and Steve takes advantage of it by throwing himself bodily against Schmidt with all his significant body weight behind it. The force of it forces Schmidt to stumble backwards—and then he overbalances, trips, and goes crashing into the machine standing in the center of the plane with Steve on top of him. The metal of the machine topples helplessly under their combined supersoldier weights, and from within, the Tesseract comes tumbling out in a flare of blue-white light.

"You fool!" Schmidt screams, spit flying. He drags himself out from under Steve's body and grasps for the glowing Tesseract with his ungloved hands. Steve braces himself for some brutal show of force, prepares himself to kick the Tesseract out of Schmidt's hand or tackle him down to the ground again—but he never gets the chance.

As soon as it makes contact with the Red Skull's bare skin, the Tesseract begins to glow brighter and brighter. It envelops the Red Skull in the same blue-white light that emits from it normally. And then— and then Schmidt begins to dissolve into non-existence, as best as Steve can tell. It's not that he dies, precisely, or that he vanishes into nothing the way Steve's seen victims of the Tesseract-powered HYDRA weapons do. Instead, it almost looks like he's fading out of existence, parts of him disappearing in a flare of light that leaves behind a momentary afterimage of galaxy-riddled space. The Red Skull screams once more—in rage or in pain, Steve can't quite tell—but then the sound fades away, too, as he fully disappears from view.

The Tesseract's light dies down to its usual level of brightness after, apparently finished with its work. Without the Red Skull's hand to hold it up anymore, it tumbles to the floor of the plane. For a moment, all is still, and then with a hiss and a small column of smoke, the Tesseract melts through the body of the plane entirely and plummets into the waters below.

Steve stares at the hole left behind in the hull of the plane for a moment, attempting to wrap his mind around the happenings of the last thirty seconds. Suddenly, the plane tips forward, the destroyed machinery of the controls finally giving way. He's thrown bodily against the side of the plane with a force that drives the air from his lungs and sends shocks of pain all the way down his back.

Gasping, Steve forces himself back onto his feet, gripping on to any handhold he can find in order to pull himself upright and drag himself to the front of the plane. Miraculously, the handle of the plane's control stick remains intact, and he tugs on it as hard as he can. It creaks ominously, snagging against some piece of broken metal within, but the plane reluctantly levels out into something like a normal horizontal angle.

Hoping against hope, Steve presses the button for the radio. "Come in. This is Captain Rogers. Do you read me?"

He almost whoops for joy when he hears Morita answer. "Captain Rogers, what is your—"

"Steve?" And then there's Peggy on the line, her voice still clear and bright through the crackle of the radio. Steve's heart clenches in his chest with an emotion he can't quite name. "Steve, is that you? Are you alright?"

"Peggy!" he says instead, hoping the tone of his voice can convey something of that emotion. "Schmidt's dead!"

"What about the plane?" she asks, ever practical and competent, although he can hear the relief lacing her voice.

The beginnings of a smile edges onto Steve's lips, even as he tells her, "That's... a little bit tougher to explain."

"Send me your coordinates," Peggy instructs. "I'll find you a safe landing site."

Steve looks over at the navigational screen of the plane, hoping to find useful information. What he finds there, instead, sends his heart tumbling low enough to join the Tesseract at the bottom of the ocean. "There's not going to be a safe landing," he says slowly.

"What do you mean?" Peggy demands, a note of fear under the calm and collected veneer of her voice.

"This plane's carrying a lot of bombs, Peggy," he explains, dreading each word that comes out of his mouth. "They're all going to blow if I don't stop the plane. I can't exactly turn the plane around, but I can try and force it down."

"I'll get Howard on the line," Peggy responds, fast and desperate. "He'll know what to do." The "I don't know what to do, and it terrifies me," goes unspoken, but he can hear it clearly.

"There's not enough time," he says gently. "This thing's moving too fast and it's heading for New York. I gotta put her in the water." The fear he felt a minute ago is giving way fast to resignation. With every syllable he speaks, every breath he takes, the certainty sinks deep into his bones like marrow. It even feels right, almost.

"Please, don't do this," Peggy begs, and it shatters some piece of Steve's heart that survived the apocalypse of Bucky's death. "We have time. We can work it out."

"Right now I'm in the middle of nowhere," Steve tells her. "If I wait any longer, a lot of people are gonna die." She doesn't respond, and he can almost hear her trying to come up with a suitable counter-argument on the other side of the line. "Peggy," he adds gently, "this is my choice." He knows she'll hear the echo of her own words, recognize the weight of what he's saying.

For a moment, there's nothing but silence on the line. He takes a deep breath, and then before he can begin to doubt his decision, he pushes down on the controls, sending the plane into a nosedive. The wind begins to roar, rushing in through the cracks in the hull of the plane, and he wonders of Peggy can hear it on the other side. "Peggy?" he asks, as the ice of the cold Arctic waters rush up towards him.

"I'm here," she says, shaky but sure.

"I'm gonna need a rain check on that dance," he says. It hurts, the thought that he's never going to be able to dance with her, that he'll never step on her toes with clumsy feet and she'll never laugh brightly at his stumblings. For now, for these last few precious moments, though, he wants to pretend that he can. That this is all nothing but a bad dream, and when he crashes, he'll wake up as if from a nightmare. Bucky will be there, shaking him awake, and when he walks outside their shared tent, he'll find Peggy looking whip-sharp and poised as ever.

"All right," Peggy says, playing along with his make-believe. "A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club."

The Stork Club. New York. Steve smiles, despite the terror racing in his heart now. Of course Peggy chose New York, for him. "You got it," he promises fervently, as if saying it with enough wishful thinking behind it can make it true.

"8 o'clock on the dot," Peggy tells him, almost chiding in her firmness. "Don't you dare be late. Understood?"

"You know, I still don't know how to dance," Steve says, wondering if this is the last thing he'll ever say. The ice is so close now, swallowing up the entirety of his view, and there can't be that many seconds left until he hits it. He wonders if the impact will hurt badly, or if it'll knock him out immediately.

"I'll show you how," Peggy tells him. He's sure she would, too. No doubt Peggy's a masterful dancer, as graceful and sure on her feet on a dance floor as she is on a battlefield. "Just be there."

He pretends he doesn't hear the earnestness of a desperate prayer behind her words, says instead: "We'll have the band play something slow." The ice comes closer, closer, closer, and he tears his eyes away from the looming whiteness to look at Peggy's picture in his compass instead. "I'd hate to step on your—"

The Valkyrie crashes into an ice ledge in the Arctic with a resounding crash.


	2. Protector, Resurrected

They give Steve three days to “adjust” to the new world he’s suddenly found himself in. Three whole days in which to think about all the people who were alive just yesterday, suddenly gone. Three whole days in which to think about all the people he thought he’d be dying before. Three whole days to look out the window of the giant Manhattan flat they give him, staring out at the mutated skyline from a room ten stories higher than he had ever imagined possible.

On Day Four, when the man named Nick Fury finally shows up at his door again and tells him they’re taking him back to SHIELD for testing, Steve is almost grateful. This, this he knows from his early days in this new body, and even from before that when they took every candidate for the Super Soldier Serum project through extensive physical testing. This is something he can do, something finally familiar, something to take his mind off the incomprehensible reality of his current life.

Director Fury and his lackey—an unassuming man in a bland grey suit who introduces himself as Agent Phillip Coulson—lead him to a black van with darkly tinted windows. As they drive through the city that was once home to him, Steve studiously does not look out the window. Out in the streets are familiar streets turned strange, and endless ghosts wandering them—and in the silence of his own whirling mind, Steve can admit that he doesn’t know if it’s the strangeness or the lingering ghosts that he’s more afraid of.

When they finally get to the SHIELD office, a large, glass-walled building somewhere in the northern edges of Manhattan, Steve steps out of the car without a word and confidently walks into the building without waiting for Fury or Coulson to guide him. Since the serum, blueprints and building layouts have come easily to him. A part of Steve wants to show off a little, of course, prove that he’s still capable of doing _something_ useful, but the larger part of him wants to test these men’s response. Did they do their research? Do they know that memorizing the convoluted hallways of a building he broke out of just once is something he’s capable of doing? How well do they hide their surprise, or the lack thereof? As he steps into the large hall that had greeted him when he broke out of his phony hospital room three days ago, he glances back as covertly as he can to try and gauge the two SHIELD agents’ reactions. Unfortunately, they’re either entirely unsurprised or remarkably good at schooling their expressions; Steve can’t get a read on whatever they might be thinking. Instead, Fury just inclines his head towards the left, down a hallway that Steve has not yet been down. Three doors in, he finds the remnants of the fake room still being taken down; two more doors from that room, the Fury opens the door and lets him into a space that reminds him more of Stark’s— _Howard’s_ —lab that anything else he’s ever seen.

There are several large tables covered with instruments he can’t begin to fathom the purpose of—long tubes and metallic coils and glass beakers full of liquids. The walls are stacked with shelves piled full of books and boxes. The right side is connected to what looks like an observation room, and the back of the room is full of large, strange devices. For a moment, Steve thinks he’s back in that room with Howard, the first time he picked up a the shield—except here, the lights are too bright, the left wall is made entirely of glass windows that look out over the entire city, and there is no Howard Stark except as a passing ghost in the corner of his eyes.

“This way, please, Captain,” Agent Coulson says, shaking Steve out of his reverie of memory. Coulson leads the way to the back of the cavernous room, and Steve follows obediently and carefully. He’s almost afraid to breathe to hard, much less touch anything, worried that he could break some priceless futuristic equipment with one wrong swipe of a clumsy finger.

“We’ll start off simple,” Fury says from behind Steve, as they finally comes to a stop in front of the row of sleek black machines. “Some physical testing—running, endurance, muscle strength, and the like. Agent Coulson will guide you through it. I’ll be back in a few hours to check in on your status.” With a flourish of his long black coat, Fury spins around and disappears out the door, leaving Steve alone with this man he met less than half an hour ago.

“If you could just step onto the treadmill, Captain,” Coulson prods. Steve considers telling the man that he doesn’t know what a “treadmill” is, that these fancy devices didn’t exist seven decades ago, but the shocked stare and the apologies and the patronizing explanations that will surely follow don’t seem worth the effort. Instead, he assumes the machine whose lit-up buttons Coulson is currently pressing is the treadmill he means, and steps onto it flat black platform without a word. Coulson waits until Steve has both feet planted on the platform, and then presses one finally button.

Suddenly, the surface of the platform begins to slide back from beneath his feet, and Steve takes a startled step forward, and then another. The surface continues to move, sliding back faster and faster from under his feet, and it dawns on Steve that he’ll have to keep walking—or running, if the thing keeps moving faster—to avoid falling off.

“Are simple laps around a field considered too old-fashioned these days?” Steve asks, the question mostly rhetorical. He isn’t really expecting a response, and it almost surprises him off his feet when Coulson actually answers.

“Well, the treadmill—and the weight machines, and all the rest of this equipment—helps us measure your physical capacity in a more controlled setting for better accuracy,” the man says, watching Steve run. “Besides, it would take quite a few laps around quite a few fields to truly test your capacity, don’t you think, Captain?”

It’s the third time in less than five minutes that Coulson has called him “Captain,” and Steve can feel the title settling uncomfortably over his shoulders. “Please, just call me Steve,” he requests. “I’m off duty, right? I’m not Captain America right now.” It occurs to him suddenly that he’s never heard his name from someone else’s lips since he woke up; it’s always been Captain Rogers, or simply Captain—or even just “soldier” from Fury, that first day when he ran out into the glittering spectacle that is Times Square now.

“Given that you are here, at SHIELD headquarters, undergoing examination for SHIELD-related purposes, I believe you are, in fact, technically on duty,” Coulson explains. “And I’m… honoured, Captain, truly, but since you are on duty—and since I am, at the moment, your temporary handler—I’m afraid it would break SHIELD protocols and be the height of unprofessionalism to use your first name here. I could call you Captain Rogers, if you’d prefer?”

“Sure, whatever you want,” Steve says, fighting to hide the dejected resignation from his voice and expression. There’s a bit of a blush on Coulson’s cheeks, and it would be interesting on a man who’s been so stoic so far—but Steve can’t muster up enough interest to care about it. He turns his head back towards the treadmill instead, focusing on the rhythm of his feet falling against the moving surface. Coulson speeds it up slowly but steadily, until the machine is whirring frantically and Steve’s breath is coming in light pants. He jots something down on the notepad in his hands, and Steve wonders briefly if they always do this with pen and paper, or if it’s a deliberate if weak attempt to give Steve a sense of familiarity by avoiding the modern tablets and phones with fancy glowing screens.

A few minutes later, Coulson turns the machine back down, until it gradually comes to a stop. He gestures Steve off the treadmill and towards the next machine, where he informs Steve that he should grip the two horizontal bars and lift it over his head. Steve bites back another comment about whether lifting stacks of sand bags and even cars over his head is too old-fashioned, and instead concentrates on not bending or breaking the rubber-covered metal bars under his hands.

They move on like that, from machine to machine to machine, until all of Steve’s muscles are aching and his stomach is growling with hunger. Coulson frowns a little, the first time the noise in his starving stomach grows loud enough for his ears to pick up, and rummages through a small cabinet in the corner of the room. He throws three small packages of something towards Steve, and Steve catches it instinctively.

“Meal replacement bars,” Coulson explains, when Steve keeps staring at them in confusion. “They’re not the most appetizing food in the world, but they’re dense and high-calorie and should help keep hunger under control. I apologize—I know you have an increased caloric need, and it probably won’t satisfy you much, but I’m afraid that’s all we have on hand in here.”

Steve tears off the crinkly wrapper off of one bar, revealing a block of light brownish stuff about the size of three of his fingers. He takes a cautious bite of it, a little wary. It doesn’t taste awful—he’s had worse from Army rations, or even back when he and Bucky were always struggling to make ends meet—but it doesn’t taste like much, either. But it settles the hunger pangs in his stomach the tiniest bit, and Steve wolfs down the first bar, and then the second and the third in a few bites each.

He's just finished swallowing what he's crammed into his mouth when Fury reappears, almost as if he knew precisely when Steve would be done. His hands are carried behind his back, and when he comes to a stop in front of Steve and Coulson, he tugs his arms forwards to reveal a familiar shape held between his fingers.

"My shield," Steve breathes. His fingers reach out, almost without his permission, and glide softly across the painted surface. The metal is as cool and smooth as he remembers it, and the colours still impossibly bright, if a little scratched up here and there. It feels like the first real, solid thing he's touched in four days. "I thought it had been lost with the Valkyrie?"

"We retrieved it buried in the ice near the wreckage last night," Fury says—but Steve has the distinct feeling he's being lied to. There's not a twitch of a finger or a hesitation of a syllable to point at as the root of his suspicion, but something about the way the man speaks is ringing alarms in the back of his mind. "I figured it's something you'd want to be reunited with sooner rather than later."

He stretches his arm forward, pushing the shield towards Steve, and Steve receives it with careful fingers. He stares at it closely for a minute, inspecting every inch of it with a close eye. He's always taken good care of his shield, of course, but now that he's suddenly detached from everything he's ever known, the prospect of even the slightest bit of damage to the weapon that's been at his side since the start suddenly feels like a blow he couldn't possibly withstand. Thankfully, the shield is still as pristine as it was the first day Steve picked it up in Stark's lab, as miraculously unharmed by the seven decades spent in the Arctic ice as Steve himself was.

"I'd like to see what you can do with it," Fury says. "We've heard a lot about you, Captain, and your prowess with the shield. You're practically a legend in this place. Wouldn't mind seeing if the person lives up to all the stories."

The words are phrased like a gentle request, but Steve's worked with enough commanders and generals to know when commands are thinly veiled as curiosities and requests. He grips the shield with a little more intent and threads his right arm through the worn leather straps. The weight of the shield against his forearm feels a little bit like home, and a small part of the crazy, upside-down world he's suddenly in slots into place. "What do you want me to do?" he asks, glancing between Fury and Coulson.

Without a word, Coulson moves towards the left side of the room, where he opens a door hidden artfully into the off-white walls. Steve follows Coulson through the entryway, Fury close on his heels, and finds himself in what looks like a brightly-lit, overly-pristine firing range.

"Let's start with a little defensive work, shall we?" Coulson says. He gestures at Steve to move towards the center of the room, and then turns to a glossy black panel in the wall. As Steve walks towards the center, he glances back to watch as the panel lights up in bright colours, and Coulson taps it a few times. A large rifle appears from the side of the room, and Steve falls smoothly into a fighting stance. This, this he knows.

The rifle fires three times, the muzzle flaring bright with firepower, but Steve has already brought the shield up to cover his head where the gun was aimed. A mechanical whir alerts him that the gun is moving, and Steve looks out from behind the edge of the shield just in time to see the muzzle aim low; he ducks down, crouching to cover his entire body behind the surface of the shield, and listens to the loud clang of bullets bouncing against the surface.

"Now for something a little... flashier," Coulson says. Steve looks back at him, unsure of what to expect, only to find the man tapping against the panel once more. The rifle disappears back into whatever hidden space it popped out of, replaced instead by what looks like an oversized gun with a barrel the size of a grown man's fist. "I warn you, Captain, this one's got a bit of a kick."

Steve frowns, and he's about to ask what the hell that means, when the weapon comes to life with a clatter. Something large and round fires out of the muzzle—a grenade, Steve realizes with a start—and he almost stumbles with the shield in his rush to smack it away from both himself and the two men standing behind him. The grenade detonates against the far wall with a deafening bang and a flash of white light.

"They're called flash grenades," Coulson explains over the roar of another grenade firing. "Lots of noise and light, not a lot of damage. Great for testing."

Steve grunts in response, focusing on the series of grenades flying towards his face, his arms, his legs. It takes all his concentration to hit each one out of the way with enough precision to ensure it won't hit any of them; he's not about to risk detonating a grenade near them, whatever Coulson says about limited damage.

They run through another half dozen weapons like that: a flaming machine that spits out fire like a fairytale dragon, some sort of light-based weapon that fires blue bolts of light that reminds Steve uncomfortably of the Tesseract, and more. The shield blocks each one without fail, just as Steve trusted it would—although the weight of it has started pulling uncomfortably at the muscles of his arm and the bone of his shoulder, perhaps because of how out of shape seventy years in the ice has left him.

"Impressive indeed," Fury calls out, finally. "The shield lives up to the myths I've heard. I must admit, Captain, that I was rather skeptical at first—an impenetrable shield? It sounds a little ludicrous, don't you think?—but I can't disagree with the evidence here. What I want to test now is you, Captain, not the shield. Are you ready?"

Steve nods wordlessly. He's not even out of breath yet, after all. Coulson taps a few more times on the gleaming surface of the panel, and the array of weapons disappears. In their place, a dozen or more targets pop up, shaped like human silhouettes.

"The third one from the right, please, Captain Rogers," Coulson requests, and Steve lines up his shot for a moment before throwing. The shield goes flying, wobbling a little in his trajectory; it hits the target low, and then clatters to the ground, rolling listlessly across the ground before coming to a stop three feet away from Steve. Steve frowns as he goes to pick it up, surprised by the unusual mis-strike—he can count on one hand the number of times the shield hasn't hit his intended target, or hasn't come soaring back to him like a boomerang. He doesn't wait for Coulson's inevitable "Again, please!" before throwing at the same target once more. This time, the shield traces a beautiful arc, gliding smoothly through the air. The impact is a little off-center, but it hits the target nonetheless, and ricochets off the wall before flying back towards Steve. It comes fast and high, however, and Steve has to leap into the air and stretch his arms up high to grasp it with his fingertips as it rushes past. He throws one more time, wanting to be sure of himself, and this time the shield finally hits the target squarely in the center and flies back to him.

They move on to the next target, and then the next, and then the next. As the throws continue, Steve can't help but notice a trend: the shield no longer obeys him like it used to. Sure, he can usually hit his targets, even ricochet three or four times with relative accuracy. But it doesn't come easily anymore, and it certainly doesn't come rushing back to him like a child eager to run home for dinner. It's just as likely to clatter limply to the ground after impact as it is to come anywhere near him. Slowly but surely, the reality of it asserts itself over Steve: he can no longer use the shield like he used to. It won’t fly true for him, not the way it did _before_. And if he can no longer wield the shield, how can he be Captain America?

A rush of emotion Steve can’t quite identify—it feels at once like relief and loss, like liberation and defeat—rises in him. The question he almost can’t bear to ask rears its head: if he isn’t Captain America anymore, who is he in this new world where nobody knows him as anything else?

He turns towards Fury and Coulson, intending to ask what happens now. His words dry up on his lips, however, when he finds them nodding serenely as if this is precisely what they expected. “My aim’s a bit off,” Steve begins, trying to ease himself into the question he needs to ask.

“No worries, Captain Rogers,” Coulson is quick to reassure, before Steve can even continue. “It’s to be expected. You spent seventy years frozen, without moving or using your muscles. It’s understandable that you would be a little… rusty, this early on. Your muscles are no doubt unused to the motion of it, still, and they may even have atrophied over time.”

“We can’t expect everything to withstand a jolt 70 years through time and come out unscathed,” Fury adds. “The records indicated that it was extensive training, coupled with the extra strength and agility granted by Dr. Erskine’s serum, that allowed you to wield the shield effectively where no one else could. No doubt, when you fall back into a regular training rhythm, you’ll recover your skills quickly. Still, that was quite a display, Captain—I’m impressed, and I’m not an easy man to impress.”

“That’s it for the day,” Coulson says. “No more testing, at least not now. You’re free to go home, Captain Rogers. Thank you for your time.”

The two SHIELD agents walk away, heads bent together in conference. A detached part of Steve’s mind considers reminding them that he has super-hearing, too, and can make out every word they’re saying, even if they are whispering as quietly as they can. The rest of his mind is too busy processing the ramifications of what just happened. He’d been mentally preparing himself for Fury to tell him that he was no longer an asset to SHIELD, since he was no longer capable of wielding the shield as he should. The nonchalant acceptance has thrown him for a loop instead, left him floundering as he tries to figure out what’s happening.

Three things, Steve is certain of, amongst all the chaos and confusion.

One: something is wrong with the shield. No—something is wrong with _him_ , and he can’t use the shield properly anymore.

Two: neither Fury nor Coulson realize that something is wrong, beyond the simple side effects of seventy years in the Arctic. Steve would be inclined to believe that, too, except that he knew better. Nothing else in his body feels particularly out of shape or unusual, and Steve’s willing to bet the tests he just did will reveal the same. Whatever the problem is, it has to do with the shield, and only the shield. 

Three: neither Fury nor Coulson seem aware of the truth of the shield’s… abnormalities. Given that Fury is the director of SHIELD, Steve is inclined to believe that this meant no one else knows, either. And Fury’s comment implies that, whatever records SHIELD possessed of his activities during the war, they only wrote off his exclusive ability to use the shield as a consequence of the serum. Steve remembers, like an echo through the painful gaping decades of time in between, Howard’s voice the first day he picked up the shield. _I’ll tell the SSR… I don’t know, something_. _Just don’t tell anyone about this._ He can’t help but wonder if the obfuscation is deliberate, if Howard intentionally buried all his records about the shield’s properties and the way it broke all the laws of physics somehow, or if it’s merely a product of seventy years of time and forgetting and misplaced documents.

“What do I do now?” Steve asks aloud, staring at the shield in his hands. It offers him no answers, feeling alien in his hands for the first time. Steve slowly begins to walk, winding his way back through the hallways of SHIELD. More than one person jerks in surprise as they see him pass, first staring at the shield in his hands and then at his face.

“Is that really _him_ ? Is that Captain America?” Steve hears in overloud whispers, again and again. He feels a hysterical sort of laughter bubbling in his chest, and he clamps his lips together to swallow it down. _Yes,_ he shouts instead in the safety of his own head. _Yes, I’m Captain America, but I don’t know how to use this weapon you see as my symbol anymore._

As he finally walks onto the open, familiar-but-strange streets of New York, Steve wonders what it says about him that he can’t tell if still being Captain America feels like relief or disappointment.

* * *

The first time he sees Peggy, he almost walks backwards out of the room. It isn't that he doesn't want to see her, or that he's angry. It's just that seeing her lying in that hospital bed, with thin grey wisps of hair and wrinkled papery skin makes all the time that passed suddenly, undeniably real. More than the towering buildings crowding out the sky, more than the bright glittering lights that never seem to blink out into nighttime darkness, it's the sight of Peggy that drives home the gaping chasm of time between the world he knew and the world he is in now. He's not sure what hits him harder: the fact that Peggy is still alive, or that she is so aged and worn now.

Of course, she's still as whip-smart and beautiful as ever, still every inch the woman who punched Gilmore Hodge the first day she met him, but all of that's contained in the body of an old woman now. He sees the echoes of a life well lived around her, the life he once thought he'd be a part of—in picture albums around her bed, in the flowers that are changed every time he visits, in the worn books and reading glasses left in easy reach by her bed. His heart aches in loss, in longing, but he's happy for her. He really is. He tells her that much, and she smiles at him. He wonders if he imagines the way her eyes glisten a little bit, if that moisture was sadness for what's bygone or for what might have been.

The second time he sees her, it's a bad day. She's confused and dazed, greets him three times over as if it's the first time she's laid eyes on him in seventy years. He smiles at her each time, tells her the same old line about his best girl and the dance she owes him. She looks a little more unconvinced each time, still bright enough to notice the pained crinkle by his eyes despite the illness eating away at her memory. He leaves her asleep in the care of her nurses, and when he returns to the safety and privacy of his own apartment—so vast, large enough to fit every apartment he ever shared with Bucky, and so fucking empty too—he cries for a whole hour.

He tells Peggy about the shield, the third time he sees her. She's having a better day than last time, but she's already had a visitor that morning—a niece name Sharon whom Steve studiously avoided before entering her room—and exhaustion is creeping in on her. She falls asleep half an hour into his visit, her head swaying on the fluffy white pillows propped up behind her neck. He watches her like that, the lines of her face softer in sleep, and thinks about all the things in her life that he didn't get to be a part of, and all the moments in his life that she won't be there for.

He doesn't exactly plan for the words that tumble out, doesn't consciously decide to spill out one of the deepest secrets he has onto her sleeping ears. It's just that keeping them in has begun to feel like holding his breath too long, like his lungs will eventually have to gasp for air and shout out all the words building up like pressure inside a bomb. And Peggy, who knows as much about the mechanics of the shield as anyone ever did, who was there watching as he learned to use it well, is as safe of a listener as he's going to find.

"It's gone, Pegs," he whispers to her sleeping head. "The shield—or whatever let me wield it, I mean. I can't use it anymore. It's not... It's not mine." He pauses and shakes his head at himself, at the absurdity of telling this to someone who can’t hear him, much less remember it later.

He means to stop himself there, he really does, but he finds that once he starts speaking, the words come rushing out of their own will like a waterfall. He tells her that the ice must have changed him somehow, since he can't use the shield anymore. He tells her it must have been almost dying, or maybe giving up on living, or maybe meaning to die for the world and failing. He asks her what he’s supposed to do if he can’t be Captain America anymore. He tells her he doesn’t know who else he can be, tells her no one here knows Steve Rogers, only Captain America, and besides, Steve never knew how to be alone.

He knows Peggy's not listening, that she's asleep and gone in some sweet dream world of her own where his griefs and silly sorrows can't reach her, but telling her unclenches something in his chest either way. At least now, the words have been breathed into existence; at least now, they have taken shape and been released into the air. At least now, he's spoken them, albeit to a person who can't and won't respond. He leaves a little bit after that, but only after planting a gentle kiss on her temple. "Thanks Peggy," he whispers, pausing in the doorway to glance behind his shoulder. "You're always helping me, even when you don't know it."

(Peggy never tells Steve she actually woke up, a few sentences into his confession. She never tells him that she heard it, all his fears and insecurities. After all, she still remembers Steve and how he gets, even with all those years standing between them. She remembers the way he looked in that bombed-out bar after Bucky fell, the darkness in his eyes, the heaviness in his limbs, the way he carried the weight of the fall and the war and the whole goddamn world on his shoulders. Telling him that she knows won't help at all, will just push him back into his stoic shell. So instead, she does the only thing she can: nudging him back into confidence, when she can, and loving him anyway when she can’t.)

And eventually, Steve gets used to the shield again. It takes him weeks and months of training, of a SHIELD-assigned supervisor running him through strength recovery training and agility training and battle drills and increasingly complicated shield configurations. He learns to calculate the angle of the throw on the fly fast enough and well enough that, so long as the shield doesn't begin to actively resist him the way it did to others during the war, he can throw with decent accuracy.

Three months into training, Coulson—who he's come to consider as a good colleague, if not yet a friend—introduces him to someone called Agent Romanoff. She's small and quick, with red hair like fire, and Steve knows she's dangerous the moment he lays eyes on her. She reminds him of Peggy, in a way: too easy to underestimate, and all too ready to prove you wrong in the most impressive of ways. She teaches him to move lighter, to be faster and quieter on his feet, to use his shield for purposes other than knocking out every guy he can reach with a loud clang.

A few days after that, he meets Stark—Tony Stark, Howard's son. Or rather, Stark appears out of nowhere one day, knocking at his door with a bag full of gadgets he can't begin to fathom. Tony looks so much like Howard that when Steve first opens the door, he thinks for a moment that the last few months have been nothing but a fever dream and he's back in the 40's again. But then Tony opens his mouth—"Tony Stark, everyone and their mother knows me but apparently you've been living inside an ice cube for the last seventy years so you get a pass"—and the illusion shatters like a dropped mirror.

Tony (Steve can't bring himself to call him Stark, even though it feels odd to call a man he just met by his first name) presents him with a magnetic system that can have the shield fly back to him after every throw. He explains the technology to Steve, but Steve mostly stops listening after he figures out what it's supposed to do. He hates that it drives home just how much he's lost his command of the shield, but it's endlessly useful, and he bends to practicality with as much grace and gratitude as he can muster.

He gets used to it all, eventually. Even though the shield feels heavier on his arm every day, even though his shoulders protest more and more with each throw, even though sometimes the weight of it on his back feels like it’s bending his spine out of shape all over again—it’s fine. He meets a group of other superheroes that Fury calls the Avengers, saves the world or just New York a few times, and it’s fine. It’s _fine._

It takes almost a year—two dozen missions, endless training sessions and drills, and one world-ending apocalypse fight with a _alien army_ in the middle of New York City—until it starts feeling lighter again. He doesn’t notice at first, the way it slowly but surely starts responding to him better. He should know better, he knows, but he’s fallen into the same trap as everyone else. Each time he thinks he’s getting better with the shield, he dismisses it as simply being the result of practice, tells himself that he’s just more used to it now, that he’s just in better fighting shape. His inability to work with the shield like he once did has become an uncomfortable and strange but incontrovertible part of his reality now, just like the neverending lights in Times Square or the way Tony could almost be Howard sometimes.

It isn’t until after a fight with a particularly tenacious criminal ring in Queen’s—the guys are not especially dangerous or deadly, just apparently as resistant to eradication as cockroaches in his second apartment—that this new reality is shaken once more. As he’s leaving the SHIELD debrief, Tony catches him in the hallway, demanding, “Why didn’t you tell me it was broken?”

“What?” Steve asks, utterly confused. “What was broken?”

“The confused grandpa act will only get you so far, Rogers,” Tony says, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you never told me. What the hell have you been doing this whole time, running after your shield mid-battle? Dammit, the reason I gave you a magnetic recall system was so that you could _use_ it, not so that you could leave it dangling on your arm like a pretty but completely non-functional piece of jewelry. I’ve got your uniform and shield in the lab now, I’ll have it fixed—no, improved and strengthened and elevated to levels you can’t imagine right now—by tomorrow morning.”

Tony disappears down the hallway, apparently satisfied now that he’s delivered his monologue. Left alone in the bustling hallway, Steve blinks like a fish, because he never noticed that the magnetic recall was broken; the shield has been coming back to him just fine. And that—that can only mean one thing.

After a few prolonged seconds, Steve manages to shake himself out of it enough to start weaving his way towards the exit. His mind is still preoccupied, though, and he almost barrels over three different agents in his path. Each time, he mumbles some vague apology, and tries his best to pretend that his world hasn’t tilted off-axis yet again.

* * *

The sky is high and clear, the air is just that right blend of breezy-but-not-chilly, and the latest menace to a couple million lives—a handful of mad scientists with some complicated plan to silently poison the water supply—now sits in SHIELD custody, and it's not even 5 pm yet. The bad guys this time around were just trying to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard instead of the entire goddamn world, so really, it was a tame threat in the large scheme of things. (Steve tries hard not to think about what kind of circus his life has become such that “someone’s trying to wipe out the Eastern Seaboard” counts as a pretty easy Saturday.) All in all, it’s a beautiful day.

After the SHIELD mission debrief, the Avengers all pile into a single Quinjet and fly towards Avengers Tower. It's a post-mission tradition by now, borne of that first "shawarma party"—Tony's words, not his—after the Battle of New York: they all crowd into one elevator in Stark's state-of-the-art building, climb up to the roof, and celebrate with drinks and a beautiful view of the New York skyline. It doesn't matter if the mission went well or terribly (although it's always more fun if victory was on their side); after all, in this line of work, every day that you don't die is worth celebrating. Team bonding, Tony calls it. Steve never gets drunk, can't, but the boisterous camaraderie that follows feels warm and familiar, reminds him a little bit of the way it used to be with the Howling Commandos, so he joins in without protest.

"You, my friends, are all in luck today," Tony announces as they tumble out of the elevator into the cool night air. "I've decided I'm breaking out Daddy Dearest's favourite expensive whiskey tonight, and you're all invited."

Clint whoops, and Thor joins in; beside them, Bruce nods with less dramatic appreciation. Natasha, on the other hand—

"No vodka?" she deadpans. "It's not worth drinking then."

"You wound me," Tony says, clutching his chest with mock pain. "Your words pierce me to the core." He hands her a glass, nonetheless, and she accepts it with alacrity that betrays her words.

Steve accepts his, and holds back a sigh. He enjoys the taste of good liquor, he does, and he's not about to scoff at Tony's generosity—this single glass probably costs more than the apartments he used to share with Bucky—but sometimes, he just wishes he could get drunk off of it. He doesn't even want to get _that_ drunk, really, doesn't need to get smashed and black out. He just misses the freedom of a little bit of intoxication, that gentle lowering of boundaries, the pleasant blurring of his thoughts.

"Here, try this," Thor says, suddenly standing behind his shoulder. He produces a small, sleek black bottle and pours a drop into Steve's glass, and then a few more into his own. "The finest Asgardian mead to rival any nectar of the gods. One drink of this is enough to put any warrior in Asgard in the highest of moods."

"Awww, wait, c'mon," Clint says, an exaggerated whine in his voice. "Why don't the rest of us get to have fancy alien booze?"

"I'm told a single drop can intoxicate Midgardians beyond control,” Thor says gravely.

"Steve's Midgardian, too!" Clint protests.

"Ah, but the Captain also possesses an enhanced biology that appears to rival mine," Thor responds. "After all, no Midgardian beverage has successfully intoxicated him as of yet. It seems only fair that I share some of my drink, so that he may participate in our revelry in equal capacity as the rest of us."

"Thanks, Thor," Steve says, his cheeks burning lightly for a reason he can't quite put to words.

"No need, Steven," Thor says. He raises his glass to the sky, and shouts: "To the Avengers!"

"To the Avengers!" the rest of them echo in scattered refrains.

Steve takes a sip of his Asgardian-spiked drink. It burns down his throat pleasantly, but no differently than any other drink he's had since becoming big. However, a few seconds later, he feels a subtle heat begin to spread throughout his chest and belly. A few more sips, and he's sure of it; the Asgardian booze is making him drunk, just a little bit. "Thank you," he says more fervently this time, tapping Thor on the shoulder. "It works, I can feel it."

Thor simply smiles, looking extremely pleased with himself.

After that, well, the night dissolves into laughter and exaggerated stories and bragging contests. Clint tells the story of the time he hit a trail of camouflaged gunpowder from two miles away, blowing up an entire enemy compound. Natasha casually mentions one mission where she went undercover as a marriage counsellor, and none of them can quite tell whether she's bluffing or not. Thor talks of similar celebrations in Asgard, after the time he defeated a charging twenty-foot beast with a name none of them can pronounce, but apparently resembles a gigantic boar with an armor of granite. 

"Yeah, having a giant magic hammer probably helps, big guy," Tony says at the end of Thor's dramatic retelling. "C'mon, what's the secret? Why are you the only one who can carry Mjolnir?"

"It is not limited to me," Thor responds innocently. "Anyone who is worthy can lift the hammer. It just so happens that the only person Mjolnir has deemed worthy, so far, is me."

"You know, I'd normally call that a cheap trick," Clint interjects. "I mean, I grew up in a circus, I've seen all the cheap tricks. But I was there, you know, in New Mexico. None of the SHIELD agents could make it budge an inch. Hell, even Thor couldn't lift it, for a minute."

"That was a dark time in my life, yes," Thor admits. "And perhaps it was in overcoming it that I became worthy of Mjolnir."

"What about you, Steve?" Natasha says suddenly.

Steve jerks to attention. "Me? What does Thor's hammer have to do with me?" he asks, baffled.

"You're the only other one here with a special weapon," Natasha explains. "So. What's the story with the shield?"

"I am not the only one," Steve protests. "You've got your Widow's Bites, Clint's got his bow, Tony's got the suit, all of those are special weapons too."

"Yes, but those are all tech," Natasha dismisses easily. "Rumour has it the shield is special. Magical, even."

"Oh please," Tony says. "That thing is a hunk of metal—no offense to you or the shield, Steve. How special can it be?"

"Why hasn't anyone else used it, then?" Natasha asks.

"Maybe it's just really, really heavy?" Clint says. "I mean, supersoldier, super-strength, super-heavy. Makes sense."

"The only time that Steve wasn't around since its first reported use, it was also lost in the Arctic," Bruce adds. "Otherwise, Steve's always been around for it. Could be there was no need for anyone else to use it."

"Where are you hearing these rumours, anyway?" Tony asks.

"I've got my sources," Natasha says primly. "And the first rule of having good sources is don't tell anyone about your sources."

"You know what? Fine. I'm gonna put your silly rumours to shame," Tony declares. "Steve, gimme your shield."

Steve doesn't even have time to say "what?" before Tony's up on his feet, plucking the shield from where it sits next to Steve. He stumbles a little with the weight, but manages to grip it by the end, preparing to throw it like a frisbee.

"Maybe don't do it on the roof of a hundred-storey building," Bruce interrupts. "You know, no barriers around the roof? Thousand foot drop to the street? Civilians walking below?"

"Shooting range has targets," Clint suggests.

"Fine, fine, let's go," Tony says, and they all pile back into the elevator. Steve follows slowly, baffled by the chain of events. It feels like one minute ago, they were talking about Thor's hammer, and now Tony's about to try throwing his shield—the very shield that Tony's father gave Steve all those decades ago.

When they arrive in the shooting range on the thirty-eighth floor, the place is already brightly lit and setup with a dozen targets. The perks of living in a building with an omnipresent, omniscient AI system, Steve supposes. Tony heaves the shield back up to shoulder-height, swings his arm back and forth a few times, and then launches it towards the center target with a low grunt.

The shield barely makes it two feet away from Tony before clattering to the ground and rolling in a wide circle.

Clint and Thor laugh loudly, Natasha smiles, and even Bruce looks amused. Steve stares, suddenly aware that he'll have to explain somehow why the shield doesn't work for Tony. How much can he tell? And even if he decides to, what does he understand well enough to tell? All he has is Howard's guesses to go off of, and they may not hold water in twenty-first century light.

Tony flips them all off before going to pick up the shield. "JARVIS, gimme the arm piece of MK27," he instructs, sticking out his right arm; seconds later, scattered pieces of the armour zoom out from various corners of the room and assemble themselves around Tony's hand and forearm. Steve whistles, impressed, and Tony does a little mock bow before turning back towards the target. This time, when he throws it, he gives it a little boost from the repulsor in his hand.

The shield soars, its trajectory promising for a moment, before it loses height rapidly and drops to the ground several feet away from the target.

Clint snorts and picks up the shield before Tony can reach it. “Let the master of projectile weapons show you how it’s done,” he says. “Watch and learn, Stark.” He takes three steps further back than Tony did, closes one eye as if to line up his aim, and then throws the shield. It flies wide, missing the target to the left by at least a foot. Clint stares after it in a mixture of shock and abject horror.

“Having some performance issues there, Clint?” Tony teases.

“Shut up,” Clint snaps as he goes to retrieve the shield. Steve hears him mutter, “but I _never_ miss,” multiple times under his breath.

Thor volunteers to go next. His attempt gets the closest yet, almost skimming the top of the target as it flies past, but still fails to hit. He’s still smiling, though, seems entirely unfazed by his failure to throw the shield. “It is a testament to the ability and the worthiness of a brother-in-arms,” he says. “How could I be upset that Steve is even more remarkable than we thought?”

He attempts to pass the shield to Natasha, but she shakes her head. “I told you, shield’s magical,” she says. “I’m not the one trying to challenge that. I get a free pass from this embarrassing display.”

Thor then turns to Bruce, who hesitates for a moment before taking the shield. “I’m sure I know how this will end,” Bruce says as he steps up to throw, “but what the hell. I might as well give it a try, since everyone else is doing it.” He pulls his arm back and then flings the shield forward with enough force that he stumbles forward a step afterwards. Disappointingly, the shield only glides for a few feet before coming to a gentle stop on the floor.

“Fine, Steve, your turn,” Tony declares. “Show us how it’s done. Tell us your secrets.”

A little reluctant, Steve pushes himself off from the wall he was leaning against. He takes the shield from Bruce and runs his fingers around the edge a few times. He pushes his forearm through the leather straps, paying attention to the alignment of the shield and the way its weight feels against his muscles. For some reason, standing here in a brightly-lit shooting range with all the rest of the Avengers watching is making him more nervous about making a successful throw than any critical mission situation has ever done. He takes a deep breath, tries to calm himself, and launches the shield.

It wobbles a little in the air, and it flies a little more to the right than Steve intended, but it still hits the target before clattering to the floor.

“What, no fancy ricochet moves?” Tony demands. “C’mon, that was tame.”

“I think the deal was _hit the target,_ Tony,” Steve says, trying to hide the relief surging through his body. “I think I demonstrated my… _superiority_ with the shield pretty clearly, don’t you think?”

“Daaaammmmmnnnnnn,” Clint says, the word drawn out into two long syllables. “I think Cap just obliterated you, Tony.”

“Yeah, well, I’m _impaired_ ,” Tony insists. “Fancy booze. That’s it. That’s the problem here.”

“The rest of us are drunk too, Tony,” Bruce points out. “If you’re gonna blame it on alcohol, so can everyone else.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Tony says. “Doesn’t matter. Not my fault. It was all the alcohol.”

“This reminds me of an old Asgardian myth,” Thor says suddenly. “It is more of a… fairytale, really. But we do have tales of a legendary shield capable of blocking any attack. As the story goes, anyone whose intent is not to protect will be crushed by the weight of the shield. Only a true protector is able to carry it.”

“I’m going to hazard a guess that this mythical Asgardian shield is not red white and blue,” Natasha says.

“No, of course not,” Thor cedes easily. “And it is not an Asgardian shield, no—an artifact older than even our history, tracing back through legends to a time when the Seven Realms were still one world. It predates even Mjolnir by millenia, or so they say.”

“Well, since none of us were crushed by the shield,” Tony says slowly, “I think it’s safe to say this _isn’t_ that mythical shield.”

“Plus, the shield was given to Steve during World War II, not millennia ago,” Bruce chimes in.

“I was not suggesting so,” Thor agrees. “It is an old myth, after all. The Captain’s shield merely reminded me of the story, that’s all.”

“Well, as fun as it is throwing around Steve’s shield, I’m heading to bed now,” Bruce says. “‘S already late, and we kinda fought a bunch of evil scientists today.”

“Gotta get my beauty sleep,” Natasha adds.

“Hey, I want my beauty sleep too,” Clint says.

“Go to bed, become beautiful, be functional people, sure,” Tony says. “I’m kicking you out of my shooting range.” They all climb back into the same elevator, and disperse into their own rooms throughout the Tower.

Two hours later, Steve is the only person still awake in the Tower. He stares up at the ceiling, thinking about Thor’s story. _Only a true protector is able to carry it_.

The first time he picked up the shield, he was still preoccupied with Bucky, with saving— _protecting—_ his best friend. And all those times during the war, it was always about protecting civilians, the innocent victims of Nazis, as well as the rest of the Allied troops. The fights now, too, are about saving the world from the newest menace to humankind.

He thinks about all the times the shield has failed, either for him or for others. Those campside contests with the Howling Commandos were just that—contests of pride and bragging rights, not protection. And God, on that train, Steve still remembers the hot burst of rage he’d felt at seeing that HYDRA goon shoot down Bucky. It may look like protecting Bucky from the outside, but Steve knows that his goal then was to take revenge on the man for hurting Bucky as much as it was to protect Bucky. The same holds for the fight on the Valkyrie, when the shield took out the plane’s controls: he was avenging Bucky’s death as much as he was saving the world.

Maybe… maybe Thor’s legends aren’t as farfetched as they seem. If Steve allows for the distortion of old oral tales over time, then perhaps… perhaps that’s exactly what the shield is. Maybe that’s the secret Howard couldn’t figure out all those years ago—it isn’t anything about the serum, or even about Steve. It’s just one thing: _protection_.

* * *

When the Winter Soldier wrenches the shield from Steve’s hands, it’s not just the force of the metal arm shoving him that sends him stumbling back. The image of him standing there, vicious and deadly with the shield hanging from his arm, tickles some vague wisp of a memory in the back of his mind. It’s not that Steve suddenly knows exactly who the Winter Soldier is, or even that he's seen him before. It's more like... an echo, an afterimage, a wavering reflection on the surface of a lake. Maybe it's the slope of a shoulder, or the angle of an arm; maybe it's the contrast of black leather combat gear next to gleaming red-white-blue metal. All Steve knows is that the sight of the Winter Soldier holding his shield is enough to make his mind skip a beat, leaving his feet to stumble on the broken-up asphalt of the road.

He doesn't really get a chance to dwell on it, to chase down the wisp of memory in the hopes of finding the fairy-hut at the other side of it. A half-moment after he regains his footing, the Winter Soldier flings the shield at his head with alarming force and speed. Fortunately for Steve, the shield apparently isn't too willing to cooperate with this HYDRA assassin, and it flies far enough left of his body that he can dodge it with a sharp, hurried jerk to the right. The shield whizzes past him in a burst of wind and lodges edge-first into the door of a van behind him, slicing through the metal like melted butter and embedding itself deep.

As much as Steve would like to retrieve it, the Winter Soldier is hot on the heels of the shield, ready to hit with deadly force and accuracy what his throw missed. Steve is busy parrying this hit and dodging that blow—sometimes coming heavy with all the weight of a metal arm behind it, sometimes tipped with a vicious serrated blade—mere seconds later. Even as the fight has him backing away further and further away from the shield, his most trusted and familiar weapon, there's little Steve can do except keep blocking, keep trying to get a blow of his own in.

It takes the Winter Soldier flipping him bodily over a car for Steve to catch a long enough break to grab his shield. He lands hard on his back upon the concrete of the road, the impact driving all the breath out of his body, and he doesn't even have the space of a blink to catch his breath before he's rolling away to avoid a punch that pulverizes the concrete where his skull was half a heartbeat ago. The force and speed behind that one hit forces even the Winter Soldier to slow down for just for a fraction of a second to regain his balance—but that fraction of a second is all Steve needs to tug the shield free from the van's door.

After that, the flow of the fight tips of Steve's favour. The Winter Soldier is still terrifyingly deadly, still almost too fast and almost too strong—but only _almost_. With the shield in hand, Steve is well-matched to take him on. In fact, the shield gives him a bit of an edge, but not the way he would have expected it to.

The Winter Soldier keeps trying to rip the shield away from Steve and throw it back at him. Tactically, Steve supposes it makes sense: rob him of his best weapon, arguably the single most powerful weapon in this fight, and then use it to incapacitate him. The problem, however, is that the shield is more than just a circle of super-strong metal; it's also (probably) an ancient alien artifact that does not always obey the will of the wielder. So even though the Winter Soldier is strong enough to keep ripping the shield away from Steve, each time he tries to throw it back at Steve, the shield tends to fall harmless near Steve's feet. At one point, it even rolls back towards the Winter Soldier, ending up tangled between his feet and sending the man stumbling backwards for several frantic steps.

An opportunity like that, in a fight this deadly and this closely matched, is one Steve cannot afford to let slide. Rushing forward, Steve catapults over the shield in one fluid leap and lands a solid punch in his enemy's gut, before using his momentum to flip the man over.

The force with which he throws the man wrenches the black half-mask away from the bottom of his face. Steve tracks it with his eyes as it clatters noisily across the ground, trying to watch it, his shield, and the Winter Soldier's turned back all at once. As he slowly backs towards his shield and picks it up, the Winter Soldier regains his feet with a slow deliberateness reminiscent of an angry tiger preparing to strike. Steve grips the shield more firmly in his hands, plants his feet, and prepares to keep fighting.

The Winter Soldier turns around, at last unmasked. He stares at Steve wearing a ghost's face. And not just any ghost, but—

"Bucky?" The name leaps off Steve's tongue without his conscious thought or permission. Steve isn't sure if it's a prayer or a denial. God, that is _Bucky's_ face, HYDRA's deadliest assassin is wearing _Bucky's_ face, glaring balefully at him with the piercing grey-blue eyes Steve still sees in his dreams, and Steve's heart might have stopped beating ten seconds ago.

"Who the hell is Bucky," the Winter Soldier asks, no inflection or emotion in his voice.

But Steve is used to every expression on Bucky's face, in Bucky's voice; he can see the confusion raging behind those eyes as clearly as if Bucky had shouted it out at the top of his lungs for the world to hear.

And it is Bucky, it is.

It doesn't matter that Bucky fell from that train seventy years ago, a thousand feet down a craggy ravine that no one should be able to survive. It doesn't matter that, even if he had survived the fall, Bucky should be as wizened and aged as Peggy is now. It doesn't matter that for some horrific reason, Bucky had ended up on HYDRA's side, apparently with no memory of even his own name. Steve would recognize those eyes, that voice, that jawline and those cheekbones anywhere. That face is on every page in every sketchbook he's ever owned: sometimes sketched in its entirety, sometimes simply in the curve of a dimpled chin here, and the arching quirk of a brow there, but always there. In fact, Steve's already questioning how he didn't notice that the Winter Soldier was Bucky throughout this entire fight.

The roar of a grenade launcher from his right shatters through his echoing thoughts. Steve's head turns towards the source of the sound on instinct, locking eyes with Natasha for just half a moment.

When he turns back, Bucky has vanished again, just like he did on that rooftop after Fury's assassination.

It doesn't matter. That's not going to stop Steve. Even as the STRIKE team swarms them and kick them all down to their knees, Steve's eyes are still fixed on the spot where Bucky disappeared. Some distant corner of his mind is aware enough to keep tabs on the soldiers, to try and strategize a way out of this mes, but mostly, he's still stuck on the look of stricken confusion on Bucky's face, on the way his own name sounded uncomfortable on Bucky's tongue.

As the STRIKE team—no, the HYDRA agents, he might as well call a spade a spade—load them all up into a black prisoners' van, there are only two thoughts on his mind, repeating again and again like some old prayer chant.

Number one: it's his fault.

Number two: He has to get Bucky back.

It doesn't matter how. It doesn't even matter if it gets Steve killed, as he's sure both Nat and Sam will warn him.

Bucky's still alive. Steve's gotta get him back. It's as simple as that.

* * *

Steve watches the first blast of cannons from the Insight helicarriers light up the sky in bursts of fiery orange. As the Charlie carrier fires and takes impact, he can feel the entire hull of the massive aircraft shudder. The vibrations transfer all the way through his body, up weary bones and aching muscles, and jars painfully at the bullets still lodged inside him.

One to the leg, one to the gut.

Lying there, bleeding and hurt and so, so tired, Steve thinks this is not a bad way to go, after all. He's finished one last mission with the closest thing to friends he has in this new century. Natasha, who dragged him out of his shell with corny jokes, who watched Fury die in that hospital room right next to him. Sam, who he met just days ago, who was willing to take in two fugitives wanted by perhaps one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world, who he thinks could have become a friend better than he imagined he could have now, if only they'd had more time.

Beneath him, the helicarrier shudders again. He watches the sky illuminated by the bursts of missile fire, like some morbid echo of those Independence Day fireworks Bucky always joked were meant for _his_ birthday. It's a good memory to hold as his final one. Steve closes his eyes, waiting for the moment a blast tore right through him, or finally dropped this monstrous weapon into a watery grave in the Potomac below.

Perhaps he was always meant to drown, he thinks wryly. Planes and water must be in his fate.

A sudden cry of shocked desperation lurches Steve out of his spiralling thoughts. He forces his eyes open and drags his injured body towards the railing at the end of the platform. He has to hold on to the railing with a white-knuckled grip to pull himself up, but he manages to reach something vaguely resembling an upright position. Below him, on the shattered outer shell of the helicarrier, Bucky lies trapped by a massive metal beam fallen from the crumbling aircraft. As Steve watches, his weary mind slow to comprehend the picture in front of his eyes, Bucky shoves at the beam with his trapped arms. The beam does not budge an inch, and Bucky lets out a cry of desperation tinged with fear.

Steve grits his teeth and forces himself to move. Every aching muscle, every wounded inch of his body protests his movements—but there is no world in the entire universe where Steve Rogers is capable of leaving a wounded Bucky Barnes to die.

It doesn't matter that there might be nothing of Bucky left in there. It doesn't matter that Steve himself is probably going to die on this plane. It doesn't matter that, if he sets Bucky free, he might come up swinging that deadly metal arm right into Steve's face. It doesn't matter. He left Bucky behind once to a fate far worse than death. He won't, _can't_ , ever do that again.

As Steve approaches, one arm wrapped tight around his core to try and ease some of the pain shooting through him, Bucky's eyes grow wider and wider. His movements grow jerky and uncoordinated, fueled by increasing desperation. When Steve finally gets close enough to reach him, Bucky flinches away, sheer terror in the cry that rips from him.

That, perhaps, hurts worse than the bullet in his gut. Bucky is afraid of him, is afraid of what Steve might do to him. It hurts once because of the simple fact that _Bucky is afraid of him_ , and doubly because of all that it implies about what Bucky has come to expect from people who approach him when he's hurt and helpless.

There's no time to try and soothe Bucky though, no time to explain his intentions. The helicarrier is shuddering worse and worse now, almost enough to topple him from his feet. It won't stay up in the air long, and if he doesn’t get Bucky out from under this beam, neither of them are going to make it out of this mess alive.

Steve braces his feet, unwraps his arm from around his midsection, and grips the bottom of the beam as strongly as he can. He takes a deep breath, bracing himself, and then pushes up with as much strength as his tired, bleeding muscles can conjure up. He sends a silent prayer up to God, to Erskine, to whoever might be watching this corner of fiery Hell on earth, that his miracle of a body can achieve this final feat.

The beam twitches, shifts just a little bit. Gritting his teeth, Steve pushes his shaking muscles, and with a grunt of effort, the beam finally lifts up just enough for Bucky to move. Immediately, Bucky reaches up his metal arm—the one Steve didn't wrench out of his socket—and clamps onto a miraculously intact support beam to drag himself out.

Steve lets the beam topple, uncaring whether it hits him on the way down or not. His mission is truly done now. Bucky's safe, or as safe as Steve can help him be.

A second later, something hard and cold smashes into the side of his body. Steve stumbles back with the force of it, but he doesn't react otherwise; he was half expecting this, after all. He doesn't hit back, doesn't even try to defend himself.

For one frozen moment, he and Bucky stare at each other. Battered and bruised and bleeding, one with a dislocated shoulder and one with a bullet hole in his gut. They make one sorry hell of a pair, the two of them, but at least they're a pair at all.

“You know me,” Steve pants out. Rationally, he knows it's probably all for naught. He knows that he probably can't break through seventy years of whatever HYDRA did to Bucky, that if beating each other up like rabid dogs in a fight hadn't woken whatever’s left of Bucky, it's likely that nothing else he did would.

But rationally, he and Bucky should both be long dead and gone, just dusty bones buried somewhere deep and forgotten. And yet here they are.

So he has to try. For the sake of who Bucky once was, and who he once wa: and who they once were to each other, he has to try. He can't _not._

“No I don't!” Bucky shouts at him.

Steve is more ready for the punch that comes swinging this time, but he only manages to dodge once; the second one slams into his injured stomach, driving the breath from his lungs. He stumbles back, grunting in pain. As his arms come up, he can practically feel the way Bucky’s muscles tighten with tension, expecting Steve to retaliate. But All he does is reach up to pull off the cowl covering half his face.

Maybe, just maybe the sight of his face will jog some long-asleep piece of Bucky’s memory. And even if it doesn't, he wants to face Bucky one last time as himself, as Steve Rogers, not Captain America. He wants it to be just Steve and Bucky one last time, even if it's been cruelly twisted by so much time and horrors they never could have imagined.

“Bucky,” he says, the name at once a prayer and a plea. “You've known me your whole life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

“Shut up!” Bucky screams, stalking toward Steve. He aims a punch squarely towards Steve’s head, probably with enough force to shatter his skull.

Steve ducks, but doesn't strike back, doesn't even raise the shield. He can't. He’s so, so tired, and he hurts, and the man he loved and missed more than anything else in the world is back but doesn't even remember him anymore. He doesn't have it in him to fight anymore, not anyone or anything—but especially not Bucky.

“I'm not gonna fight you,” he tells Bucky. He lets the shield tumble from his hands into the swirling river below. He's afraid for a moment that it'll come flying right back to him with perfect precision, the way it's been doing since that fight on the highway, since his only mission became freeing Bucky from HYDRA’s grasping fingers. But this time, the shield goes down and stays down, perhaps because it can tell that Steve doesn't want it back.

“You're my friend,” he adds, when Bucky just stares at his empty hands. There's so many more things he wants to say, so much that “friend” is absurdly inadequate to capture, but he doesn't dare voice them now. It's too late for that, he thinks, and besides, he probably lost the right to claim even Bucky’s friendship when he left him there in that ravine for HYDRA to get.

Bucky releases a wordless scream of rage and lunges at Steve. Steve lets himself be toppled, lets his body hit the floor with a painful thud. That metal fist crashes into his face, again and again. “You're my mission!” Bucky screams. “You! Are! My! Mission!”

Steve almost welcomes the blinding pain that comes with every brutal punch. Maybe this can be some sort of sick penance, for leaving Bucky behind, for letting his best friend and lover become this weapon of HYDRA’s. And if he really is nothing but a mission to Bucky now, then dying with Bucky’s beloved eyes above him is perhaps a kinder fate than he deserves. “Then finish it,” Steve whispers when Bucky hesitates for a strange moment. “Cause I'm with you till the end of the line.” _And this,_ he doesn't add, _I'm pretty sure this is the end of my line. Sorry, Buck._

The final, fatal blow that Steve expected never comes. His words hang in the air for a breathless moment, swirling with the echoes of all the times they said those exact words to each other.

And then suddenly, the floor of the helicarrier shatters beneath them. The entire structure crashes down towards the water, taking Steve with it. Steve doesn't bother flailing to try and save himself, just closes his eyes and braces for the cold shock of watery impact that still frequently haunts his nightmares.

 _Goodbye, Bucky,_ he thinks. _Sorry I wasn't enough to protect you._


	3. Protector, Abandoned

Steve stands on the banks of the Potomac, watching the last rays of the sunset flickering on the surface of the water.

Somewhere beneath those restless, murky waves lies the shield. As impossible as it sounds, he can almost feel the call of it like a physical thing, like a string wrapped around his arm pulling him towards the depths. He squints at the water, trying to see if he can make out a vague circular outline, or maybe a flash of red-white-blue, but the water is too deep and too dark. After another moment spent staring in vain, Steve shucks off his shirt and toes out of his shoes, standing bare-chested and barefeet with the water lapping at his toes.

He takes a deep breath and dives.

The first shock of cold, wet river against his bare skin drives a shocked gasp out of him. The air in his lungs bubbles out in a useless rush, and for a moment Steve is drowning—the Arctic is closing in around him, cold and deadly and final, and the helicarriers are burning down above him, carrying with them the tortured and hurt creature they've made of the man who was most important to him. Despite the vestige of air in his super-powered lungs, and the shimmer of sunset on the surface of the water, Steve can neither breathe nor see. Panic grips him, harsh and unforgiving. Desperate, he seizes onto the first rational thought he can produce, and swims back up to the surface just to get another good breath in.

For long moments, the only sound he can hear is the fast gasps of his own heaving breaths. Slowly, so slowly, he becomes aware of the distant sound of D.C. traffic in the background. He forces himself to focus on the way the light refracts off the beads of river water rolling off his skin, playful and unpredictable. When he can finally breathe more than half a mouthful worth of air into his straining lungs, he steels himself for the water once more, and dives in deep.

Less than two kicks in, the water grows too dark and murky to see much, but the pull of the shield grows stronger by the second. Steve closes his eyes to stop wasting useless energy and focus on trying to see past the darkness, and lets the rest of his senses guide him instead. He reaches the bottom of the river a few powerful kicks later, and stumbles a blind hand on the ground, searching. His right hand reaches out in a wide sweep against the rocky riverbed, and then—

Something smooth and metallic brushes against the tips of his fingers, and Steve curls his fingers in close, clutching the edge of the shield. He curls his body, planting his feet firmly on the ground, and then kicks up towards the surface as hard as he can, the shield dragging beside him.

He breaks the surface of the water with a heaving breath, exhaling hard to clear his nose of leftover water. It's a matter of a few strokes to reach the shore, and then Steve is standing there, dripping with water. He lets the shield clatter on to the ground, now that it is safely out of the water. He wonders, for a moment, if this was anything like how Bucky felt after dragging him out of the water. He wonders what made Bucky save him—and what made him walk away, after. He wonders what Bucky is doing with himself, now that Pierce is dead and HYDRA has crumbled to pieces.

But he refuses to stand around wondering much longer.

He's going to go after Bucky, and he's going to find him, and bring him back home. Now that he has his shield back, and now that HYDRA is gone, there's nothing left to hinder him.

After the first time Steve gets into a fight with what's left of HYDRA, he almost feels like whooping for joy. He'd almost forgotten just how smooth the shield could feel, how familiar and RIGHT. He'd almost forgotten the way the metal would slide easily in his fingers, the way it would go soaring across the room and hit his targets and then rush back to him, all without a single conscious thought. And now that he has it back, the rush of it is almost addicting.

Of course, it helps that the easy familiarity of the shield's movements reminds him that this, this is the right mission for him to be on. He couldn't give up looking for Bucky if he tried, but it's nice to know that the shield, at least, backs him up here.

Steve knows he's having trouble keeping the emotion off his face, and Sam looks at him weirdly that entire night, but he can't quite bring himself to care.

He has the shield back, now, and he'll have Bucky back soon, too. There's nothing in the world that could dull the joy of that.

It isn't until three months later, when they've been on four continents and in at least two dozen countries, that Steve finally admits he might have overestimated his chances of finding Bucky. Bucky is a master assassin after all, a superspy, a secret agent who could evade detection for just about forever if he wanted to—and it seems like right now, he _really_  wanted to avoid being found by Steve. Every time Steve starts to feel like they're closing in on a substantial trail, Bucky disappears like smoke into thin air, only to appear four days later halfway across the world.

The lines of exhaustion on Sam's face are getting darker by day, and Steve finds it harder and harder to look at him in the eyes as the weary days go by. It isn't fair, he knows, to ask Sam to give up everything just to help Steve search for a man who doesn't even appear to want to be found. It wasn't fair when he first asked, and it certainly isn't fair now, when the grueling pace of their journey and the daily stres of the search is starting to wear on Steve and his super-soldier body as well, never mind Sam's impressive but still entirely un-enhanced body.

The shield, too, is starting to slip away once more. It's that, more than anything, that's making it harder and harder for Steve to justify continuing the search. He has pretended for a while that it was exhaustion or sleep deprivation or sheer panic that had made him misalign his throws just the tiniest bit. But the weight of the shield has started to press on his bones again, started to tug on the muscles of his arm and dig into the straps on his shoulder. Somewhere, in the dark corners of his mind that he tries to avoid, he knows that te knows the shield is resisting him again because his main goal is no longer helping Bucky for Bucky’s sake; the driving force of his search has now shifted to himself and his own selfish, desperate hope of getting something familiar back again.

He still refuses to give up for a while, just because he can't bear to admit it. But three months, one week, and four days into their search, he misses his target entirely for the first time; the shield flies wide, soaring high above the head of the HYDRA goon he'd been aiming for, and it's only Sam's speedy reaction that saves Steve from taking another painful bullet to the gut.

After that, Steve can't deny it any longer. His selfishness is putting undue pressure on Bucky, he knows, and now it's also putting Sam's life at risk. Sam doesn't berate him for it, only give him a significant and knowing look—the one that says 'I know there's something you're denying to yourself, and I'll be here when you're ready to admit it'—and shame rushes fast and choking in the pit of Steve's belly. Two days later, when he quietly tells Sam that it's probably time to call off their search, Sam doesn't say anything; he just hugs Steve tight for several long, weary heartbeats.

Steve knows what Sam is assuming: that he's too tired, too emotionally involved and compromised, to continue the search effectively. That the stress of it all is finally getting to him, and that's why he can't throw the shield right or continue looking for Bucky. He doesn't bother correcting Sam, doesn't tell him that the significance of the shield missing goes much deeper than that. It’s not like the core of Sam's assumption is wrong–after all, it is because Steve’s head is not in the right place that he can’t throw the shield properly right now–-it’s just that the mechanics of it is not what Sam thinks. Explaining it is too much effort and too much shame, though, especially when Steve himself still doesn't quite have the words to say exactly how it all works.

So Steve leaves it alone and just lets Sam hold him, the night he finally admits, soft and defeated, that they should go back home.

* * *

When General Ross shows up with the Sokovia Accords in hand, Steve's first thought is that he should have seen this coming. He should have known that an entity as powerful as the Avengers would not be left to stand alone for long.

He tries to give the Accords a chance, he really does. He reads the giant, dense document as thoroughly as he's capable, tries to see the logic in each clause and paragraph. But before he's even halfway through, he knows he's not going to sign it, and by the time he's done with it, his resolve has only grown stronger.

He can't see it as anything other than a power grab. They can couch it in whatever language of accountability they want; that's not what the Sokovia Accords will actually provide. All it does is take their own power of self-determination, of their choices, and hand it over to whatever UN council they appoint. All it does, as he tells the rest of the Avengers, is shift the blame from themselves that council. And what happens if the council makes the wrong decision, sends them somewhere they shouldn't go or doesn't send them where they should? What happens—as it is bound to happen in any battle, in any war, no matter how "legitimate" it might be—when there is inevitably innocent, bystanding lives lost in the fray? There's no accountability for any of that in the entire of the document, no clause about consequences or repatriations or repercussions.

And what about the timing? Steve's no expert in governmental proceedings, but he's pretty sure a document this long and dense takes at least a few weeks to fashion. Why is it that the Avengers are only being told about it now, with only three days left before its signing and ratification? And the ultimatum—sign it, agree to this immediately and in its entirety or retire—seems extraordinarily aggressive to him.

The conclusion he keeps coming to, no matter what train of thought he follows, is this: someone wants the Avengers under their control, and the rest of the "enhanced" population along with them, and they want it bad enough to threaten and overpower and steamroller an international agreement couched in tempting but empty words. Steve doesn't really know what said someone's agenda is, but he does know he can't trust it. He does know that he can't sign this document with good conscience.

Perhaps what happened with SHIELD, with HYDRA and the STRIKE team and Pierce, with Bucky—God, _Bucky_ —has made Steve paranoid. Perhaps he's grown too distrustful of organizations like that, and it's poisoning his ability to reason about the Accords. But if an institution like SHIELD, which was formed with the best of intentions by the best people he ever knew, could be so thoroughly corrupted, then he has no faith that this UN council will stay pure. Hell, what about the terrible precedent set by the World Security Council, long before SHIELD every collapsed? That council, yet another group intended to protect people and provide oversight for SHIELD, had once wanted to send a nuke into Manhattan to "save" the world. What's to stop this UN council to come to a similarly absurd and deadly decision? What consequences will there be if they do, other than millions of innocent lives lost?

It helps that the shield is still on his side. The shield responds to him perfectly, obeys him better than it ever has since he woke up—except, perhaps, the time when he was trying to protect both Bucky and the world at once during the Insight fiasco—almost as if it shares his mind. He knows his intentions are right, that he at least is still trying to do nothing else but save the world. Of course he'd still argue against the Accords without the shield's magical alien powers backing him up, but it's nice to have that confirmation.

What he is worried about is Tony and Wanda. Tony, because he looks so tired, because he sounds like he's already given up and made his mind up to hand over himself to the control of the Council. Never mind that this is the man who once refused to give the U.S. Army his armour, because they were _him_ , because he was Iron Man, and the armour and his own self were inseparable and he wasn't willing to subjugate himself to them. Sokovia and Ultron had shaken Tony badly, perhaps because he felt deeply responsible for Ultron's creation—and now that those wounds were being reopened, Steve isn't sure how well Tony will hold up.

And Wanda... He's caught her more than once staring at the news, listening to the world spitting vitriol at her again and again and again. She'd fought so hard to shake off the black mark that being Ultron's one-time ally had left her with, not to mention her brother's death and the near destruction of her country. She's been burdened with so much already, and _God_ , she's so young still. Far too young to have seen and known and hurt as much as she already has.

Perhaps he can't help Tony, can't change his mind or unburden his guilt, but he thinks he might be able to help Wanda.

After they've all read through the Accords once, and the first round of arguments are over, the Avengers disperse for a little while to cool down and think it all over individually. Steve spends some time running through all the scenarios in his head, and when he's confident that he's right, that he can't and won't sign the Accords, he goes to find Wanda instead.

He's not surprised when he finds her in her room, staring at the news once again. He leans against the doorway, watching her for a moment—the way her shoulders shake just a little, the way her eyes widen every time they replay the dreadful footage of that explosion. Finally, he picks up the remote from where it's been abandoned on a corner of her bed and sits down next to her.

"It's not your fault, you know," he says. He can hear the echoes of Peggy's voice from all those years ago in his own words. He remembers how hollow they'd sounded to him in that bombed-out bar, and winces.

"That's not what they're saying," Wanda responds without taking her eyes off the black screen. "They're being very specific."

"If I had been paying attention like I should have, if I hadn't let Rumlow shake me so easily, then that bomb would never have gone off in the first place," he says. After all, he was the one facing down Rumlow, and it was his job to stop him. Wanda wouldn't have needed to intervene if he'd just been strong enough not to let the mere mention of Bucky's name throw him so thoroughly. "So it's my fault too."

"It's on both of us," she concedes after a brief moment.

"It is, and it isn't," he tells her. This, this is important. If he can't convince her of this, he doesn't think she'll last very long as an Avenger. Not because she isn't strong enough, or because she isn't powerful enough, but because she'll try to carry a weight no one can. It had taken him so long to learn this himself. "It's Rumlow's fault, in the end. All we were trying to do was to stop him, to do the right thing and protect the world. If we hadn't fought him, he'd have gotten away with that bioweapon, and God knows how many people would be dead then. If you hadn't stopped that explosion there, hadn't sent him up into the sky, a lot more people would be dead. This job... we try to save as many people as we can. That doesn’t always mean everybody. And if we can't live with that, then next time... Next time, maybe nobody gets saved."

Wanda looks at him with wide eyes, a mixture of skepticism and hope in her eyes. "How do you know, though?" she asks him. "How do you know it was the right thing for us to do? That we're really protecting the world, and not making it a worse place?"

Steve looks away from her for a moment, hesitating. "I don't always know, and I don't always get it right," he starts. "But I... Here, it's easier to just show you. Come with me to my room?"

Wanda looks confused, but follows him out without a question. When they get to his room, Steve heads over to the corner where his shield rests, leaning against the wall.

"This shield was given to me by a good friend many years ago," he tells her. "He didn't know it then, but it's... well, it's some sort of an alien artifact, like Thor's hammer. It's supposed to only work when the wielder's intention is to protect. Anything else, and it starts behaving weirdly: flying in directions it wasn't supposed to, landing far short of its targets, suddenly feeling too heavy to lift... So I know I'm doing good whenever I can use the shield properly. I don't rely on it exclusively to be my moral compass—I was getting into fights and arguing with people long before I had this shield, trust me—but having this to check me when I'm straying from the path helps."

Wanda stares at the shield like it’s grown two heads and started singing the national anthem. Steve chuckles and extends the shield towards her. “Go on, try it. We can’t really throw it in here, but I know you’ll be able to pick it up, at least.”

“But…” Wanda says, hesitating. “It’s heavy, isn’t it?”

“Not if your heart’s in the right place,” Steve tells her.

She stares for a moment longer, unmoving, but then reaches out with trembling fingers. Steve waits for her to wrap her slender fingers around the edge and get a good grip on the metal, and then slowly lets go. He can see the muscles in her arm tense, bracing against what she expects to be an unbearable weight, but the shield simply rests lightly in her hands. Wanda’s eyes go wide, and then slowly, she begins to lift it up until her arms are extended over her head, holding the shield above her head like a red-white-blue halo.

“See?” Steve says, a smile stretching on his lips. “Told ya. You’re a protector, too, Wanda.”

Wanda smiles back at him. It’s a little faint, perhaps, still shadowed by the memory of all the vitriol she’s been listening to, but it’s the first time he’s seen her smile since Lagos. “Thank you,” she says quietly, setting the shield down gently.

“I didn’t do anything,” Steve says. “That was all you, Wanda.”

* * *

 _Christ_ , Steve thinks as he and Sam get Bucky’s metal arm secured in a heavy vice. _We gotta stop ending up like this, Buck._

Once Bucky's arm is properly secured, and his body as comfortably situated as Steve can arrange it, Steve backs away slowly. Sam watches him with worried eyes set in a weary face.

"You okay, Steve?" he asks in a low whisper, as soon as Steve gets close enough to hear.

"I'm fine, don't worry," Steve answer automatically. "You're the one who took a hit bad enough to knock you out. How're you feeling?"

"A little woozy still, but I'll live," Sam says easily. "And you know that's not the what I was asking about. You _just_ saw Barnes again, for the first time in like three years after chasing after him around half the globe, and then he went all Winter Soldier on you again and tried to kill both of us. Stuff like that fucks you up, man."

Steve lets out a dry huff of laughter. "Tell me about it," he says. "But at least he's still alive, and safe for now. When he wakes up, we'll deal with whatever version of him is in his head then."

"You and I both know it's not that simple," Sam says. "But I'll let it go for now. Ross is probably foaming at the mouth trying to get his hands on all three of us. I'll take first watch by the window, you can stay here and stare at your boy for a while."

With those words, Sam disappears into the back of the warehouse they're hiding in, where a narrow gap in the walls lets them see out into the streets below. Steve pulls up a crate from a corner of the warehouse, just like the one they sat Bucky on, and does exactly as Sam says: he stares at Bucky, and he thinks.

He thinks about the life Bucky had apparently built himself in Bucharest, however temporary it might ahve been, and how tired Bucky had sounded in that apartment when Steve showed up. He thinks about the way Bucky had known exactly how to escape the apartment and get away safely, had it not been for the unexpected arrival of Prince T'challa. He thinks about the way Bucky had insisted that damned doctor call him Bucky, not James. He thinks about the way Bucky's eyes looked when they were brought in, resigned and determined and a little fearful, and the way those same eyes had been completely, terrifyingly blank when he and Sam finally reached him after the power cut out. He thinks about the unhesitating, unrelenting, deadly precision with which Bucky attacked both him and Sam, giving the doctor time to escape.

It was the shield that tripped Bucky up, in that fight. Steve's mind brings up clashing memories that jumble in his head like broken jigsaw pieces. Him and Bucky during the war, with Bucky buttoned up in that navy peacoat of his, sharing the shield on a battlefield against an endless sea of HYDRA. Him and Bucky on that helicarrier, the shield dropping from his hands into the Potomac. Bucky tearing the shield right out of his hands on that highway in D.C.. Bucky on that highway, slowed down and tangled up by a shield that refuses to move as he tries to make it. Bucky a mere ten minutes ago, his eyes once again blank and emotionless, ripping the shield from Steve's hands only to throw it aside in frustration when it wouldn't obey him properly. Bucky during the war, surrounded by the Howling Commandos as they waste time playing throw-the-shield laughing as his attempt to throw it into a nearby tree lands three feet short.

Steve's head is swirling in memories, lost so deep that he almost jumps out of his skin when Sam taps him on the shoulder. "Your turn to take watch duty," Sam says. Steve doesn't ask how much time has passed, just stretches cramped legs and reluctantly forces himself to start walking. "I'll keep an eye on your boy, don't worry," Sam reassures him. "I'll tell you as soon as he starts to so much as twitch, okay?"

Of course, Steve would much rather be watching Bucky himself, but he doesn't tell Sam that. He's pretty sure Sam knows already, anyway, and is using watch duty as a way to force Steve to step away from Bucky for a bit. Maybe it'll even do him some good, having a little bit of time for himself to get his head on straight and stop wallowing in memories both bittersweet and aching. He positions himself next to the gap in the wall they're calling a window, stares out into the pale blue sky and the busy streets below. He tries to get his mind to go blank, to find a small oasis of peace in the turmoil that's taken over his life since the Sokovia Accords, and Peggy's death and the funeral, and the Vienna attack, and Bucharest, and the arrest, and... He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath to shake away the creeping panic, and forces himself to stare at a small cloud marring the blue expanse of the sky and think about nothing else. Just the sky, and the tiny cars moving beneath them, and a small cloud drifting across the buildingtops.

"Hey Cap!" Sam shouts suddenly, startling Steve. He has no idea how much time has passed, only knows that it's long enough for that cloud he was watching to have disappeared out of sight now. He pushes himself off the wall he was leaning against, and hurries his steps towards the front of the warehouse where Bucky sits trapped.

"Steve," Bucky breathes, as soon as he's in sight.

The sound of his name in Bucky's voice makes something soft and weary in his chest tremble, and the beginnings of a smile dances on his lips despite his best efforts. Still, Steve keeps his voice as level and cold as he can when he asks, "Which Bucky am I talking to?"

Bucky stares at him, baffled. Steve can pinpoint the exact moment when the truth dawns on Bucky, and his eyes glaze over with horror. Bucky drops his head, gaze fixed to the floor, and then lets out a wry, humourless laugh. "Your mother's name was Sarah," he starts. The corners of his mouth twitch into a momentary flash of a tired smile. "You used to wear newspapers in your shoes."

Steve feels his mouth mimic the expression on Bucky's lips, a tired smile tinged with heartache. He can practically feel Bucky stuffing newspapers in his shoes again, attempting to make salvaged shoes two sizes too big fit against Steve's small feet. "Can't read that in a museum," he says, a strained attempt at humour.

Bucky huffs out a breath that might be a laugh, and Steve feels like doing a victory dance. He approaches Bucky without hesitation, turns the lever to release the pressure of the vice so Bucky can free his arm. "Do one last thing for me?" he asks Bucky.

"Sure, pal," Bucky says, although he looks a little wary. "What do you need?"

By way of answer, Steve unhoists the shield from his back and hands it to Bucky. Bucky accepts it, wariness morphing to utter confusion. He raises an eyebrow at Steve, wordlessly asking what the hell was going on. "Throw it at me," Steve tells him, walking backwards so that he's at least twenty yards away from Bucky.

"Steve, are you outta your mind?" Sam yells. "No offence to Barnes, but he tried to kill you an hour ago!"

"It'll be fine, Sam!" Steve yells back. "Bucky's not gonna kill me. I just wanna test something, that's all."

"Steve, I gotta agree with Sam here," Bucky says. "How do you know I'm not gonna kill you? Hell, _I_ don't even know for sure that I'm not gonna kill you."

"I trust you, Buck," Steve says simply. And it really is as simple as that. He knows Bucky, and knows that he won't kill him. "I know you're not gonna kill me. C'mon, just throw it, and I'll stop badgering you, I promise."

Bucky still looks skeptical, still looks like he wants to give Steve an earful of lecture about not trusting recently-brainwashed assassins with deadly weapons. However, after another long moment of hesitation, he heaves the shield up to chest level and slings it towards Steve. The shield flies smoothly, like a particularly well-aimed frisbee, and lands gently in Steve's arms.

"Told you!" Steve crows, practically jumping for joy. "See, Sam? Bucky's not gonna kill me, and he's not gonna kill you."

"What, just like that, we're supposed to be cool?" Sam asks incredulously. His eyes are wide with disbelief, and his voice full of reproach when he says, "Steve. _Steve._ "

"I gave him a perfect shot to kill me," Steve says. "And instead he gave me the shield back as gently as a perfect basketball pass."

" _Steve_ ," Bucky and Sam say in unison. They stare at each other, equally shocked by the unexpected synchronization. After a beat, Bucky adds, "That's a _terrible_ strategy."

"Hey, it worked!" Steve insists. "It was a brilliant strategy." It's easier to explain, anyway, than that he wanted to see how well Bucky would be able to handle the shield. The Winter Soldier had never been able to command it efficiently, and yet here was Bucky, throwing it with perfect precision. So, this couldn't possibly be the Winter Soldier acting like Bucky in order to get close enough to hurt him or Sam or both.

That's all Steve needs to know. He has Bucky back, now, even if it might be temporary. That's all he's ever needed, his whole life.

* * *

Fighting against Tony with Bucky is like having his most fervent wish and his worst nightmare rolled into one terrible mixture.

On the one hand, Bucky’s back here with him, at his six again. Steve had almost been sure he’d never see Bucky again, and yet here he is, fighting side-by-side and back-to-back just like they had before. Here they are, two men who by all measure of reason should have died decades ago, finding each other again on a battlefield where they’re finally on the same side once more. They even share the shield, back and forth and back and forth, and it almost feels like sharing a mind, like they might be connected once more.

On the other hand, he doesn’t want to fight against Tony, not at all. He’s never wanted to, not even when the issue of the Sokovia Accords were first brought up. He doesn’t want to fight against Howard’s son, against a man he’s come to consider a teammate and a close friend, against another superhero who’s just trying to make the world better, to make it safer. And to be fighting because Bucky’s the one who killed Tony’s parents— _God,_ Bucky killed Howard and Maria—because Tony wants to hurt Bucky in revenge… It’s a brand of horror even his overactive nightmares never managed to conjure up.

Perhaps he’s lucky, in a twisted sort of way, that fighting Tony keeps him far too busy to ruminate much. At least he can push his swirling, tormented thoughts away when the only thing he needs to focus on is _get Bucky out safely_. And then, when Tony blocks their exit with one well-aimed repulsor shot, _keep Bucky safe and don’t let Tony kill him, no matter what it takes._ And if Tony gets his way, it _will_ end with Bucky’s death, Steve’s sure of it. He saw the blind rage in Tony’s eyes, the utter lack of hesitation when he wrapped his arm around Bucky’s throat and strangled the air out of him. He won’t stop until Bucky’s broken and dead, and Steve… Steve just can’t let that happen.

Bucky’s already lost his arm— _again,_ God dammit, what kind of horrific cosmic joke is it that this trauma could be repeated twice in one life?—and the sound of his shocked, agonized scream still echoes in Steve’s ears like a ghost. If he looks down, he can still see Bucky lying there like an abandoned rag doll, still breathing and alive, but only just. He can’t let Tony get his hands on Bucky again, no matter what. He _can’t_.

For a brief minute, with that desperate determination fuelling Steve, it almost looks like he might be able to subdue Tony, and they might be able to get out of there without making an even greater mess than they already have. But then FRIDAY starts analyzing his fight pattern, and Tony seizes the shield mid-swing and wrenches it out of Steve’s hands, and the tide of the battle stands poised, ready to swing either way.

Tony lifts the shield, perhaps aiming to throw it around Steve to hit Bucky where he lies motionless on the ground, but the shield slides right out of his armoured hands like a slippery bar of soap. With a cry of frustration, Tony instinctively reaches downwards for the shield. It’s a split second of distraction, barely a heartbeat long, but it’s a chance like Steve won’t have again; if he lets this moment pass, Tony will really kill Bucky, and then… and then Steve doesn’t know what he’ll do. He can’t afford to contemplate it, not now.

Steve kicks up with a knee, hitting Tony squarely in the chest, and then lunges forwards, driving Tony towards down with the momentum of his body and their combined weight. They crash into the ground with a heavy thud, driving the air out of both of their lungs. Straddling Tony, Steve pins him to the ground with his knees and his weight. He gropes blindly behind him, and the shield practically leaps into his hand as if it was just waiting for him to reach. In one rapid motion, Steve knocks the faceplate off Tony’s armour with a slice of the edge of the shield, and then drives it straight into the arc reactor at the chest of the Iron Man armour.

The reactor flares out in blinding white light, and then fizzes out in a shower of sparks.

For a frozen moment, nobody moves. Just when Steve’s mind is about to give concrete form to the vague swirling fears, Tony opens his eyes and gasps loudly. Sighing in profound relief that suddenly makes his bones feel like lead, Steve leans backwards and tumbles off of Tony’s body, trapped inside the powerless armour. _Christ,_ for a heartbeat, he thought he had actually killed Tony. For a moment, he thought he’d driven the shield straight through the armour into Tony’s chest. He’s not even sure, really, if he managed to stop himself or if the shield resisted him—after all, _killing Tony_ was hardly a protective intention—and ceased at blowing out the arc reactor instead of going deeper. That he doesn’t know will probably haunt him in countless nightmares to come, but those are nightmares to be had another time when there is peace and time enough to sleep.

For now—for now, he has to get Bucky out of here, before Tony gets up again or Zemo comes back or Ross finds them or any number of other disasters occur. He forces his exhausted, crumbling body upright, and goes to help Bucky onto his feet again. Bucky looks dazed still, but he’s at least aware enough to reach up and grasp Steve’s hand, even if he has to lean most of his weight against Steve to walk. They hobble forwards like that, Bucky’s arm hoisted around Steve’s shoulders, Steve’s hands braced against Bucky’s midsection: the most miserable victory march in history, perhaps.

They haven’t made it more than three normal steps away when Tony shouts from behind them, “That shield doesn’t belong to you. You don’t deserve it. My _father_ made that shield!”

Maybe Tony’s just trying to lash out one final time. Maybe it’s the final, desperate attempt of a defeated man to wound, to hit where it hurts. But with those words, with sudden sharp clarity, Steve is done. He’s _done._

Maybe he doesn’t deserve the shield anymore—but god _damn_ it all, he doesn’t want to deserve it, either.

Let someone else shoulder the weight of it for a while. Let someone else be the fucking protector for once. Let someone else make the sacrifices for him, for _Bucky._ Let someone else live with the constant reminder of whether their heart and mind are in the right place. Let someone else deal with all of it. He doesn’t _want it anymore_.

He’s done trying to protect people who only turn around to point their blades at him. SHIELD, the World Security Council, the entire goddamn world. He’s tired of protecting people who apparently don’t want to be protected. He only has one goal now: to protect Bucky, to help him be _safe_ and _whole_ and _happy_ again. He doesn’t need the shield to do that.

In fact, if he walks away with one of the world’s most powerful and symbolic weapons, he knows for sure that everyone and their mother will be looking for him and the shield. And thanks to the Accords, and the news, and Zemo’s plan, both he and Bucky internationally wanted fugitives. Taking something that the entire world wants is the _last_ thing he should do to protect both of them.

Besides, if it really comes down to it–if they come after Bucky, if they hunt him down again–Steve knows he’s the only one yet who’s figured out the secret of the shield, who can pick it up and do right by it. (Sam came close, and so did Bucky, but both of them are on his side, anyway.) It’ll come back to him, if he ever really needs it to. But right now–right now, he needs it to not be his.

Steve drops the shield.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it!! Thank you so much for reading!!!  
> If you let me know what you think in the comments, I'd love you forever :)  
> Please show glide-thru's amazing artwork some love [here](https://glide-thru.tumblr.com/post/164469606965/stucky-big-bang-2017-entry-2-art-for), and if you're up to it, my fic post [here](http://capgal.tumblr.com/post/164473783558/protector-a-stucky-big-bang-2017-fic-by-capgal) as well!


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